Truth at the crossroads
It was January when Google announced their China based operations had been exploited by targeted attacks using zero day flaws in Internet Explorer. Near the end of the year we saw the largest information leak in history exposing hypocrisy of governments everywhere. Ironically it was Wikileak cables that confirmed the Google attack was almost certainly government sponsored.
The US Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the attacks on Google and affirmed support for freedom of expression everywhere. By the end of February a new campaign of fear mongering had appeared declaring “If the nation went to war today in cyberwar, we would lose”. In spite of being an ill defined meaningless term Cyberwar drums gave a base rift for the year until Wikileaks burst on the scene with more openness and freedom of speech than governments could swallow. US Vice President labelled Julian Assange, the public face of Wikileaks, a terrorist.
As the year drifts to a close one is left wondering what place truth in todays confused society. Would the Pentagon papers ever see the light of day in this climate? Would US based reporters be shipped to Guantanamo before Watergate got published?
It is the unique purpose of truth to bring light where ever it goes, that’s why it holds such a special place in life. Why it elicits such strong reactions. Regardless of forceful opinion, public relations spin, statistical obscuring or outright lies the truth remains. Unmoved and unmoving like rock under the foundations of a house. There aren’t many ways to escape truth so the popular defence of governments is to bury it. They know from bitter experience that truth is a powder keg and once lit impossible to extinguish. The most brutal and totalitarian regimes have discovered the harder you suppress truth the more it leaks like water through a grasping hand.
We can’t have things both ways; that’s called hypocrisy. Either truth has intrinsic value and we defend and celebrate that value, or we are afraid of it and seek to control it at every turn. How can we decry Chinese censorship, posing as the defenders of freedom, then join them in censorship of Wikileaks? And there’s the rub, it appears nothing Wikileaks has published is a lie. It’s all true. If it was lies the situation wouldn’t be half as important as it is.
That’s the significance of this pasty white young man from Queensland. Why he’s so important. Why I make Wikileaks my most important and influential issue of the year. Why it’s not simply black and white.
We must value truth over lies. It is not the governments job to decide what the truth is, or who may speak it. There is a good reason why part of the first amendment in the United State is freedom of speech. Not the sixteenth amendment or a minor addendum to a footnote. The first and most important.
American hardliners must tread very carefully lest they destroy the very foundations they stand upon and become those who oppose truth. It’s a dangerous path to argue governments that are proven to lie should have the power to censor truth. Should they take that path the year of 2010 may prove to be a watershed in the history of the internet and the freedom it has become for so many.
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