Cav's Place

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posted this call to arms on his Twitter page: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” And indeed we are. Or at least we should be, because the fight is not specifically over WikiLeaks, but over who controls information, who controls what we know and, ultimately, who controls our lives. As such, the outcome of this war will affect all of us, whether we realize it now or not.
You might have noticed that I used an IP address to link to WikiLeaks, as suggested in one of their Twitter posts, since the domain names can, have been and will be blocked as this continues. Interestingly, going to that “official” IP address currently redirects you to another, which may or may not be their way of saying that not even blocking their IP will stop them. Either way, a list of mirrors is also available, though there are terribly few real ones on it.

Yet, as I said, WikiLeaks is just the battlefield and the scandal just the catalyst. It doesn’t even matter what was in those leaked documents. What matters is that those who wish to know everything about us hide all they can about themselves. And that is wrong. The only things that should be kept secret by authorities are the details of attack and defense plans when they are directly and openly involved in a war and those of plans to stop real and immediate threats to the citizens they are supposed to protect. Everything else should be done openly, so this is something that had to happen sooner or later, and indeed it happened way too late for far too many, but at least it finally did happen and we can finally see the reaction of the powers that be to having some of their dirt pulled out from under the rug, which serves as one more, albeit unnecessary, reminder of what they’re made of. So all that remains is to see what our reaction to their reaction will be. All that remains is to see what we are made of.
Let me also quickly go over the topic of Julian Assange himself and say that my opinion of him as a person, if I have one at all, is quite neutral. In fact, even without the rape charges, which under the circumstances seem highly unlikely to be founded in any way, I may say that there is something that bothers me about him, though I can’t quite put my finger on it, especially since I never cared to find out much of anything about him in the first place. But, despite many currently hailing him as a hero, all of that is irrelevant because this fight is neither for him nor about him.
This fight is for and about freedom. This fight is for and about the world, because “he who controls information controls the world“. Ultimately, this fight is for and about every single one of us. They can’t win a war against all of us, but we will obviously lose it if we refuse to fight. So will we give it our best and fight to gain control of our lives and of our world or will we bury our heads in the sand and get exactly what we deserve for such a course of action? Will we learn from the world’s failure to make any use of the chance offered by Georgia, which may well result in a new Cold War, or will we repeat the mistakes of just these leaders we should now be fighting?

In the end, I’ll leave you with some quotes from the outstanding Babylon 5:
“Nobody takes power. They’re given power by the rest of us, because we are stupid or afraid or both.”
“How many people actually belong to the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Jihad Party? A very small number, but there are always plenty of other people who are happy to do the work for them and others afraid enough to let it happen.”
“Governments deal in matters of convenience, not conscience. If they fall behind, it is up to the rest of us to make up the difference. If we don’t, who will?”
“When you stumble a lot, you… You start looking at your feet. We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying ‘Make my life have meaning.’ And to our inheritors before us saying ‘Create the world we will live in.’ I mean, we’re not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future.”
“I’d rather do something and make a mistake than be frightened into doing nothing. That’s the problem back home. Folks have been conned into thinking they can’t change the world, have to accept what is. I’ll tell you something my friends: The world is changing every day, the only question is who’s doing it.”
“You can refuse to surrender; you can refuse to be broken. You just have to say ‘no I won’t’ one more time than they can say ‘yes you will’.”
And, of course, this.

We do not answer to kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, governments, parliaments or any other political, military or religious leaders. We answer to our own consciences. Let us act, so we will not live to regret not doing so. We answer to our loved ones. Let us act, so they will not suffer as a result of our failure to do so. We answer to those who will come after us. Let us act, so they will not blame us for the world they’ll live in.
We are many. We are skilled, albeit in different ways. We are smart, albeit in different ways. We are strong, albeit in different ways. And, make no mistake, as long as we’ll fight, as long as we won’t let them frighten us into inaction, we will win!