The WikiLeaks ravage - part II

The grand irony with the WikiLeaks revelations is that the organisation’s ideal of worldwide transparency may be harder to attain if the governmental response is a new information order where states, regardless of the nature of their polities, seek to rein in netizen activities.

It will take great skill on the part of established democracies to convince their own people, as well as Chinese and others under the sway of propagandistic state-controlled media organisations, that tightening information flow in the West and accusations that authoritarians want to control free speech are nothing but doublespeak.

The only way forward for diplomacy is to develop high-tech encryption tactics and smarter management restrictions on which cables should be classified and who’s entitled to read them. The leak of US confidential documents is in itself the consequence of vast expansion of security-cleared personnel allowed to read them. This is likely to change. Already in the pipeline: 2.0 propagandistic public diplomacy, increasing use of personal envoys, fewer online dispatches, more exhortations for organisational loyalty.

The latest WikiLeaks episode reminds us that the weakest link in officialdom is the individual. This time his name was Bradley Manning. In the age of social media it takes only one disloyal or conscience-stricken employee, one skilled “hacktivist,” to disseminate encrypted oceans of information, logistically impossible in pre-internet days. The diplomacy of nations has always been a highly vulnerable endeavour but, since the explosion of social and commercial networks online, there are now innumerable possibilities for renegade organisations and individuals to expose, destroy and retreat. As with the “war on terror,” contestation is about powerful and hard-to-target asymmetrical relations, which is why elite politics and high-level diplomacy are under more pressure than ever.

In future history books, the “war on terror” after 9-11 and ensuing legislation to ensure homeland security in the US will no doubt be viewed as the first step to recovering virtual territory. The second step could commence in the wake of the WikiLeaks of 2010. The fallout is uncertain.

It can be foreshadowed that governments will craft laws that target citizen-journalist activities. Citizens’ unauthorised storing of leaked material could be made illegal. Another potential outcome could be state eavesdropping, monitoring and storing information on a broader spectrum of the citizenry than hitherto possible.

From Barlowian distancing from the powers-that-be, we enter a new phase via WikiLeaks’ electrocution of traditional diplomacy. This phase entails defensive nation states and their allies using nationalistic public diplomacy, harsher legislation against businesses willing to host political and civic activists labeled as deviant, more secrecy to conduct bilateral relations.

However, WikiLeaks may open a new chapter for civil resistance against a potentially more regulated world information order, making the concepts of transnational and global civil society more meaningful than ever.

The weary giants of the concrete offline world will strike back. Nonetheless, the youth/subaltern norm that exists in all information societies will continually seek to undermine state control. Against the world’s states stands a vanguard of internet-based transnational civil society - nowhere and everywhere.