US Military to destroy Wikileaks
Since the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001 the western world, on the back of wonderful new computer technologies, has witnessed a grand march of the state surveillance system on a scale not seen before. Literally millions of security cameras deployed in public areas, voluntary and involuntary biometric searches, data mining and sharing of your tax and other government records, warrantless taping of your phone calls and detention without trial laws are all examples. Still more measures are mooted like compulsory and/or mass DNA testing and national identity cards.
A boringly long line of worthless politicians have filled the hot air with the strident cry that if you’ve nothing to hide you shouldn’t be afraid of any of this. Apparently the British government actually used the following slogan in an advertising campaign, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’.
If you don’t think about it, this appears like a decent argument. Those in fear strike a balance, thinking their privacy can’t be more important than their security.
But to throw the cat amongst the pigeons, in 1755 Benjamin Franklin said ‘They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’. I’d have to say todays politicians appear to have missed what he was driving at. Not only did he say trading away liberty was undeserving, he called liberty essential.
To add weight to his side of the argument, we have Henry Kissinger who, quoting Lord Acton said, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. If this is true, it raises many vexing questions about our current headlong drive to centralise information and control.
And so we would be clear as to who we should defend our liberty against, Thomas Jefferson said, ‘The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last restart to protect themselves against tyranny in government’.
I’ll add a chilling warning from Martin Luther King, ‘Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal’.
I’ll remind you that even if governments were pure, and history screams they are not, terrible and brutal things still happen. An extreme and high profile example is Khalid El-Masri, the german national who was kidnapped, flown to Afghanistan, tortured and then released because it was a case of mistaken identity. He lost his liberty in the name of someone else’s security.
With all that in mind, the press are reporting the US Military is pursuing Wikileaks with vengeance. For what? Well, Wikileaks made a confidential military video public. It showed a helicopter crew machine gunning down two Reuters reporters in Iraq, whilst also making it more than obvious the official record of what happened was a big fat porky. Minor details, like they weren’t obviously insurgents and they didn’t have any guns.
Now, in this case things are more complicated. The Military have an additional point on their side, that is the sad old argument for the risk to national security. Sad because any lie, untruth, error of judgement or crime can, and has, been hidden behind it. Like Harry Potters invisibility cloak, governments of every kind, age and creed have used this as an argument to obstruct justice and hide their crimes in the dark.
So there is a more stark balance of interest, but I would summarize that balance like this. On the one hand people actually did die. On the other hand people might be put at unquantified risk. One is an argument and one is a reality. I am distrustful of those who believe their actual and real crimes should be hidden because of the risk to national security or other unsubstantiated claim. I agree with Benjamin Franklin that liberty is more valuable than security, especially when that which is given to me in the name of security is not security at all. I agree with Henry Kissinger that power corrupts, and therefore having Wikileaks exposing lies to the light is, on balance, a good thing. I am one with Thomas Jefferson, that my own government is such a great risk to liberty that carrying arms can be a good thing. And I hear Martin Luther King, and remember that it was people in a government who made genocide legal.
So now we have the full weight of histories largest military complex coming down on Wikileaks because they exposed dirty laundry to the light.
Sadly for you and I, liberty and privacy are not entirely different beasts, they are absolutely connected. You cannot have true liberty without privacy and privacy does not substantially exist without liberty. Anything less is a party trick, a slight of hand with the intention to deceive. And if governments successfully silence people who drag lies into the light our liberty is dragged with them.
Finally, for the sake of irony and hypocrisy one has to ask the question of the US Military. If you’ve nothing to hide then what are you afraid of?
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