From: Rolling Stone
Taibblog
by: Matt Taibbi
I went yesterday to a screening of We
Steal Secrets, Oscar-winning director Alex
Gibney's brilliant new documentary about Wikileaks.
The movie is beautiful and profound, an incredible
story that's about many things all at once, including
the incredible Shakespearean narrative that is the
life of Julian Assange, a free-information radical who
has become an uncompromising guarder of secrets.
I'll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes
out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of
secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the
news, to the point where I think we're headed for a
major confrontation between the government and the
public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even
the Wikileaks episode.
We've seen the battle lines forming for years
now. It's increasingly clear that governments, major
corporations, banks, universities and other such
bodies view the defense of their secrets as a
desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so
that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to
punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as
tiptoes across the informational line.
This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks
– and especially the real subject of
Gibney's film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an
incredible act of institutional vengeance is being
charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and
could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.
There's also the horrific case of Aaron Swartz, a genius who
helped create the technology behind Reddit at the age
of 14, who earlier this year hanged himself after the
government threatened him with 35 years in jail for
downloading a bunch of academic documents from an MIT
server. Then there's the case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian
computer programmer who allegedly stole the
High-Frequency Trading program belonging to Goldman,
Sachs (Aleynikov worked at Goldman), a program which
prosecutors in open court admitted could, "in the
wrong hands," be used to "manipulate markets."
Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial,
was convicted, had his sentence overturned, was freed,
and has since been re-arrested by a government
seemingly determined to make an example out of him.
And most recently, there's the Matthew Keys
case, in which a Reuters social media editor was
charged by the government with conspiring with the
hacker group Anonymous to alter a Los Angeles
Times headline in December 2010. The change in
the headline? It ended up reading, "Pressure
Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337," Chippy being
the name of another hacker group accused of defacing a
video game publisher's website.
Keys is charged with crimes that carry up to 25
years in prison, although the likelihood is that he'd
face far less than that if convicted. Still, it seems
like an insane amount of pressure to apply, given the
other types of crimes (of, say, the HSBC variety)
where stiff sentences haven't even been threatened,
much less imposed.
A common thread runs through all of these
cases. On the one hand, the motivations for these
information-stealers seem extremely diverse: You have
people who appear to be primarily motivated by
traditional whistleblower concerns (Manning, who never
sought money and was obviously initially moved by the
moral horror aroused by the material he was seeing,
falls into that category for me), you have the merely
mischievous (the Keys case seems to fall in this
area), there are those who either claim to be or
actually are free-information ideologues (Assange and
Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are
other cases where the motive might have been money
(Aleynikov, who was allegedly leaving Goldman to join
a rival trading startup, might be among those).
But in all of these cases, the
government pursued maximum punishments and generally
took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations.
These prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional
terror of letting the public see the sausage-factory
locked behind the closed doors not only of the state,
but of banks and universities and other such
institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed
out in his movie, this is a Wizard of Oz
moment, where we are being warned not to look behind
the curtain.
What will we find out? We already know that our
armies mass-murder women and children
in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers
joke about smoldering bodies
from the safety of gunships, that some of our closest diplomatic allies starve
and repress their own citizens, and we may even have
gotten a glimpse or two of a banking system that uses
computerized insider trading
programs to steal from everyone who has an IRA
or a mutual fund or any stock at all by manipulating
markets like the NYSE.
These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest
that there's more awfulness under there, things that
are worse, and there is a determination to not let us
see what those things are. Most recently, we've seen
that determination in the furor over Barack Obama's
drone assassination program and the so-called "kill
list" that is associated with it.
Weeks ago, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – whom
I've previously railed against as one of the biggest
self-aggrandizing jackasses in politics – pulled a
widely-derided but, I think, absolutely righteous Frank Capra act on the Senate
floor, executing a one-man filibuster of Obama's CIA
nominee, John Brennan.
Paul had been mortified when he received a
letter from Eric Holder refusing to rule out drone strikes
on American soil in "extraordinary"
circumstances like a 9/11 or a Pearl Harbor. Paul
refused to yield until he extracted a guarantee that
no American could be assassinated by a drone on
American soil without first being charged with a
crime.
He got his guarantee, but the way the thing is
written doesn't fill one with anything like
confidence. Eric Holder's letter to Paul reads like the
legal disclaimer on a pack of unfiltered cigarettes:
Dear Senator Paul,
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: "Does the president have the additional authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer is no.
Sincerely,
Eric Holder
You could drive a convoy of tanker trucks
through the loopholes in that letter. Not to worry,
though, this past week, word has come out via Congress
– the White House won't tell us anything – that no Americans are on its infamous
kill list. The National Journal's report on
this story offered a similarly comical sort of
non-reassurance: MORE
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