ON LEAKING

Curious, isn’t it, that leaks such as the Woodward/Bernstein ‘Deep Throat’ ‘revelations’ are the stuff of which heroes are made, and others, because they reveal the extraordinary ineptitude of our government (and our political appointee diplomats, that is big Party givers), should incur the righteous wrath of the government?

Leaking is, after all, a time-honored occupation in American life, and Wikileaks is no more than a platform. The IRS will actually PAY you to leak info on your neighbor’s hidden income. There’s many a politician who’d still be riding high with illegal nannies without leaks. But as politicians consider that the sky is no limit, the leak is a last line of defense. Would you not really like a leak inside Halliburton? inside Dick Cheney’s machinations? Without leaks, would Ollie North still be fixing things in Central America?

I am not a Conspiracy Theorist, so I won’t go so far as to say that the CIA sent two bimbos out to compromise Mr. Assange. Sweden is a country with very advanced views on sexual equality, and I am not surprised by the charge, as yet unproven.

But I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the moves against him by the government, via Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard & so on, can hardly be viewed as innocent. The free and open Web is a menace to all governments and these are but the first moves by states to curb freedom of information. All politics is about concealing the real reason why a bridge must be built, a war waged, or public enquiry be avoided. Open discussion based on information is anathema to Big Government.

As the Republican leader has been reported to have said, if the Patriot Act can’t stop Wikileaks, we’ll change the Patriot Act so that we can! The worrying element in this is that not just our government can do this, but that obviously the political class around the world also can. By co-ordinating their actions they can bring down Wikileaks, and anyone who thinks that they would not be happy, too, to control the Web, lives in Cloud Cuckoo land. Big pharma attacks and closes down foreign competition, copyright-holders track down and extinguish downloads. That is the real world we live in now.

It happens that WWW, for all its weaknesses, is one of the greatest advances in Information since the Renaissance. To keep politicians’ and governments’ hands off it is the first battleground of the 21st century. We should all be girt for the fight. My cheque is on its way to Wikileaks: if I can find out how to pay it in.