The problem with punishing WikiLeaks' "illegalities" is that they haven't broken any law anyone can point to

The hysterical, fact-defying denouncers of WikiLeaks like to point to Daniel Ellsberg as a "good" leaker, despite Ellsberg's frequently and forcefully stated support for WikiLeaks.

by Ken

I've just caught up with this extremely sensible post by Electronic Frontier Foundation's Marcia Hofmann, which also gives me a chance to make an important point I didn't the last time I wrote about the hysterical, wildly out-of-proportion response of the authoritarian establishment to the WikiLeaks document releases. (For internal links, check out the EFF on-site version.)

DECEMBER 22ND, 2010

Wikileaks Mirror Taken Down: Host Buckles Under Demands from Upstream Provider

Commentary by Marcia Hofmann

Wikileaks isn't the only site struggling to stay up these days because service providers are pulling their support. It appears that at least one person who wants to provide mirror access to Wikileaks documents is having the same trouble.

Recently we heard from a user who mirrored the Cablegate documents on his website. His hosting provider SiteGround suspended his account, claiming that he "severely" violated the SiteGround Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy. SiteGround explained that it had gotten a complaint from an upstream provider, SoftLayer, and had taken action "in order to prevent any further issues caused by the illegal activity."

SiteGround told the user that he would need to update his antivirus measures and get rid of the folder containing the Wikileaks cables to re-enable his account. When the user asked why it was necessary to remove the Wikileaks folder, SiteGround sent him to SoftLayer. The user asked SoftLayer about the problem, but the company refused to discuss it with him because he isn't a SoftLayer customer. Finally, SiteGround told the user that SoftLayer wanted the mirror taken down because it was worried about the potential for distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. When the user pointed out that no attack had actually happened, and that this rationale could let the company use hypothetical future events to take down any site, SiteGround said that it was suspending the account because a future DDOS attack might violate its terms of use.

If this sounds like a lame excuse, that's because it is a lame excuse. It's incredibly disappointing to see more service providers cutting off customers simply because they decide (or fear) that content is too volatile or unpopular to host. And the runaround that this user received from his host and its upstream provider demonstrates the broader problems with the lack of any real transparency or process around such important decisions.

Internet intermediaries — whether directly in contract with their users or further up the chain — need to stick up for their customers, not undermine their freedom to speak online. As we've said before, your speech online is only as free as the weakest intermediary.

This incident shows that censorship is a slippery slope. The first victim here was Wikileaks. Now it's a Wikileaks mirror. Will a news organization that posts cables and provides journalistic analysis be next? Or a blogger who posts links to news articles describing the cables? If intermediaries are willing to use the potential for future DDOS attacks as a reason to cut off users, they can cut off anyone for anything.

This seems to me extremely well stated and argued. The point I want to come back to is that claim of SiteGround that it cut off this mirroring user "in order to prevent any further issues caused by the illegal activity." The thing is, there hasn't been any illegal activity on the part of WikiLeaks, at least none that anybody's been able to point to. If there were, you could be sure indictments would be flying, with a view to inflicting on Julian Assange and anybody who could be claimed to be complicit in these imagined illegal acts the same siege of torture that is being inflicted on admitted document leaker Pvt. Bradley Manning, an outrage that Glenn Greenwald has led the way in denouncing -- see, for example, "The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention."

The people who have committed illegal acts are the government lackeys approving and committing the torture of Bradley Manning -- not to get information, but to serve as an object lesson to any future whistleblower who might dare to pierce the government's blanket of secrecy, designed mostly to hide its ineptitude. One of the psychotically deranged themes that dots the denunciations of Manning, even from self-declared progressives, is that he committed his act out of some psychologically twisted thirst for some sort of "glory." Never mind that Manning has said he always understood that he would have to face the legal consequences for his actions. I suggest that the denouncers of his lust for "glory" submit themselves to, say, a day's worth of the illegal as well as unethical abuse being meted out to the man they scorn as no sort of proper whistleblower and then talk to us about his path to glory.

But to return to the case that WikiLeaks or its supporters have done something "illegal." All you have to do to know for sure it's not so is to watch the usual government sociopaths, starting with "Holy Joe" Lieberman, to quickly cobble together some sort of law, any sort of law, that would make what they've done illegal. I imagine the result is designed to read something like this:

Ooh, those traitorous fuckheads make us so-o-o-o mad. Goddamn it, we hate them for exposing what lying, sociopathic assholes we are, which is supposed to be our fucking secret. From now on, we have the right to kill those fucking sons of bitches, and goddamn it, we will -- and also the fuckers who's already done it, and just make us so-o-o-o-o-o-o mad, and there doesn't seem to be any fucking law we can use to blast their fucking asses. Well, now there is, 'cause we say so. By act of Congress, this date --

I understand that the anti-WikiLeaks hysterics are operating with either (a) exceptionally low reasoning power to begin with (e.g., the usual suspect among the right-wing senatorial caucus of thugs) or (b) their mental faculties twisted into pretzels by those damned truth-fetishists. But it really shouldn't be possibly for anyone, no matter how stupid or mentally disabled, to grasp that at least as of now there aren't any laws that apply here.

It's subtler to appreciate how starkly the behavior the government is indulging in now makes a mockery of fundamental American values. Contrary to the denouncers' hysteria, whistleblowers have never been popular at the time they were upsetting their applecarts. Nothing undercuts the comparison with the supposedly virtuous leaker Daniel Ellsberg, who made the drastic decision to lead the Pentagon Papers, than Ellsberg's own ringing, unequivocal identification with and support of Assange and WikiLeaks.

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