⇥ Dear Richard Stallman,
Your recent article titled The Anonymous WikiLeaks protests are a mass demo against control on the Guardian’s website is a collection of half-truths and analysis so shallow and disingenuous that it defies belief.
You claim that the DoS attacks made by members of Anonymous against several commercial interests are the equivalent of a mass protest, but you have no data to back your claim up. In real life, a “mass protest” requires, as its name implies, a “mass” of people. A DDos requires a number of computers, each one of which is capable of performing many concurrent transactions without the involvement of a human being. The real-life equivalent would be a sit-in in which each protester comes with fifty or one hundred mannequins tied to himself in order to inflate the number of “bodies” present at the protest. There is nothing, nothing to indicate that the “mass protest” is the expression of the will of a large number of people rather than the work of a small number of disgruntled individuals.
You claim that, on the Internet, people have no rights. I say that, on the Internet, we have every right—much more so, in fact, than we do in our real-life, physical dealings with other people. How can I say this? Simple—Wikileaks continues to exist and has proven that no government on Earth can shut it down. Members of Anonymous have been able to disrupt the services of large companies without risking—or, indeed, having the balls to attempt—exposing their real identities. On the Internet, given the appropriate precautions, there is no tear gas, there is no police van waiting around the corner to round up protesters and “disappear” them.
You claim that the US state is a nexus of corporate interests. This is exactly the lie people all over the world—including, I’m afraid, myself—like to tell themselves to distract their minds from one simple fact: in the vast majority of cases, the people in power, those monsters, those incompetent idiots intent on destroying the society we live in, were put where they are by us. Living in a free society, as many of us have the privilege of doing, means taking responsibility for the governments we choose, too—a practice we have all but forgotten. A protest—violent or otherwise—is justified only when it fights repression without representation, not retribution for enforcing a corporate policy or established rule of a lawful state.
I do not call myself a journalist, but I know a fair number of them—and many will agree that what sets a professional journalist apart from a regular Joe is the ability to decide whether something is newsworthy. A good journalist will not simply regurgitate documents and information, but collate it and digest it and filter it so that only what is relevant and important—newsworthy—will come to light. That is a terrible task that is often abused, but one that is as important to a free press as is the ability to publish information without fear of repercussion.
Privacy is a right that must apply to everyone, regardless of whether they work in the comfort of their homes or in the constant danger of a war zone. Governments should be held accountable to their peoples, but that is what an honest and professional press is for. Leaking hundreds of thousands of communications that their authors intended to remain private without providing any context deprives the reader of an important tool in deciding the relevance of each piece of information.
Here’s an example: I just told my colleagues that I think you’re an imbecile. There—you have complete disclosure. Or do you? Would knowing this help a third party form an informed opinion of what I really think of you? Of course not—my opinion is far more nuanced than what can be captured from a simple, off-the-cuff remark. Nor would knowing that I made the remark help any hypothetical future exchange between the two of us, as you would, justly, be prejudiced against me for expressing such a low opinion of you without knowing why. In fact, the only people who can get the full picture from that one statement are those it was intended for: my colleagues. Everyone else gets, at best, half the picture.
From a practical perspective, the only useful new piece of information that Wikileaks can be credited with disseminating to the public at large is something that IT professionals have known for some time: that electronic data is never really secure—something that governments will have to deal with if they intend to safeguard their communications.
Obviously, none of this means that what is happening to Assange is right, moral or ethical. Even the most superficial of analyses shows that his current legal woes are politically motivated. The way to combat this obvious injustice, however, is with more and better information and knowledge, not sensationalist stunts and essays that profess to promote freedom while attempting to push your own personal agenda against the corporate world.
Note: this is my personal opinion (after all, this is my personal blog) and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of anybody at php|architect or Blue Parabola.