4th December 2010
Capitalist Clampdown on WikiLeaks
Mark Hanson
It seems that the sometime claim by the free market proponents that a capitalist system prevents an over-authoritarian government from suppressing free speech may not have much truth in it.
WikiLeaks, which publishes leaked documents from a variety of sources and on a wide range of subjects, has found that keeping its mission of informing bloggers and armchair journalists has become increasingly fraught.
Following the publication of 250,000 documents from United States’ diplomatic communications, WikiLeaks has been attacked on numerous fronts.
Initially, it was subject to cyber-attacks. These may or may not have been government-sponsored attacks, yet what is clear is that the hackers that engaged in this were at the very least sympathetic to the US government.
Cyber-attacks are common on the internet, however, and the US government itself is often the victim. The subsequent developments are of greater concern.
Amazon.com ceased to host the WikiLeaks website at the request of Joe Lieberman, the senator who chairs the Homeland Security Committee of the Senate. Lieberman also called on every company that had links to the whistleblower site to cease the relationship.
Lieberman said that Amazon’s “decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."
That statement has been followed by the withdrawal of the DNS (Domain Name Server) services provided to WikiLeaks by Everydns.net. That action meant that the name people use to access WikiLeaks on the internet does not work.
These two attacks have been, thus far, thwarted by WikiLeaks as new domain names and new hosting packages have been brought into play. Yet the numerous troubles, including continuing hacking attacks, have meant that access to the site has been patchy.
Now reports are coming out that PayPal has permanently disabled the account that enabled WikiLeaks to accept online donations.
These companies, acting on request of the US governmental apparatus, are claiming that their decisions are based on infringement of the terms of service by WikiLeaks. The usual phrase coined is similar to the one PayPal has now released: "PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action."
Yet the stand upon which these restrictions are based seems to be over-zealous. Journalistic reporting of leaked documents is not illegal in the US, and is, in fact, protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Republicans would normally be up in arms over the wholesale disregard for the US constitution being wrought by the government’s request to private companies. In this instance, however, they are in agreement: Mike Huckabee has called on the person who leaked the documents to be executed.
As the Guardian reported: Huckabee, who was among the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and is likely to stand again in 2012, told the Politico website: "Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."
This all brings with it an important question: if the freedoms enshrined in a constitution do not apply in the privately owned market place, and governments can make requests that free speech be censored in contradiction of the constitution by those privately owned companies, where does that leave the claim that free speech is alive? Is it not, rather, a legal circumventing of international and national declarations on freedom of expression?
Whilst the wisdom of publishing these documents may well be in question, the alleged source of the leak, Bradley Manning, is a private in the armed forces, and any documentation available to a lower-rank member of military personnel is already highly likely known to most governments in the world, who all have their own spy networks operating in major parts of the map.
So, who is the US government trying to keep in the dark?
