The United States of Anonymous

Anonymous insignia (Kephir at English Wikipedia)

Russia and the United States are the two great military powers, with China coming up in a shaky third place. But ironically one of the great powers in today’s world is not a country with a well-armed and manned military, but rather Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whose leverage within the theater of world politics derives from information. In the 21^st Century it may not be those with the largest armies or most baleful weapons that possess the advantage but those who know who does. If you’re a superpower you might be more interested in launching a pre-emptive strike against Wikileaks than you would against your own rivals. The only problem is that there’s nothing to strike at. You may aim your weapon at the cloud or even try to spray it with the cyber equivalent of DDT, but information is like those deadly flesh eating bacteria that are capable of continually morphing into new and more antibiotic resistant forms. Let’s say you have a conventional weapon. What makes any form of aggression work is the element of surprise. However when you're up against a super hacker like Wikileaks or Anonymous, you’re offensive is going to be pre-empted, with your enemy being able to intercept the missile before it reaches its target. But it’s not only on a literal battlefield that wars take place. Insider knowledge of companies and of unreleased government policies (for instance when the Fed is going to raise its interest rate) gives those with information and a certain degree of guile a huge competitive advantage. Hacking can be used for purposes of terrorism, yet, in a way, hackers and those whose ammunition is information become formidable adversaries precisely because like their terrorist colleagues, they often don’t occupy any specific coordinates in time and space. You can run but you cannot hide does not apply to smugglers on the information highway. They can do both.

International Relations 101: Checkers or Chess?

Illustration of the Red King Snoring from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

The United States has to stop playing checkers and start playing chess. The kind of transparency that Snowden and Wikileaks have championed is a nice ideal, but it leaves casualties in its wake when you are playing the board game known as international relations. In checkers you take the man in front of you, but when you play chess you learn that you might have to sacrifice a pawn to spare a more powerful piece. We must return to the world of Machiavelli and realpolitik which is chess in political terms and we may have to learn how to play from those who we’d like to hate. Vladimir Putin is a great chess player who's a master of the art of brinkmanship. He lined up all his ducks in the Crimea and then simply walked away (instead playing The Terminator), coming out the victor though the move might not have seemed economically expedient, in terms of Russia’s relationship to the EU. He called in an IOU with his Syrian client during the chemical weapons crisis and at least for the moment seemed to be ready to step into his adversary’s shoes. Imagine Vladimir Putin claiming the Nobel prize for Peace! For a moment it didn’t seem like a far flung idea. Perhaps Putinism with a human face is what America needs to strive for. It’s nice to have the power to bully and repel bullies in a darkened schoolyard. But like in a computer game with its garish cast of hellions, there’s always going to be someone bigger, stronger, more deadly. Lots of intelligence, in both the real and metaphorical meanings of the word, less carpet bombing and an occasional drone may sound like an uglymix, but these might be the only cocktail that leads to peace, anywhere.

Your Next Stop--The Transit Zone!

Remember Rod Serling's immortal words, "You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop...”-- the The Transit Zone! Planning on visiting the Taj Mahal, The Great Wall, The Terracotta Warriors, The Great Barrier Reef.  You may have second thoughts after hearing about the pleasures of the transit zone of the Moscow Airport. Besides a T.G.I. Friday’s and Burger King, you might can enjoy celebrity spotting like guess who? Our modern day Clark and Lois, Ed Snowden and his WikiLeaks sidekick Sarah Harrison (“A Stakeout Grinds On in Airport Limbo,” NYT, 6/25/13) And then there are all the locked doors. Behind one of them is, you guessed it, Ed Snowden. The transit area of the Moscow airport is the place to go if you want to be free, at least according to Vladimir Putin, who has declared it the Cayman Islands for those who are seeking freedom from their political liens. There have been rumors that Ed Snowden and Sarah Harrison are actually rehearsing Chekhov’s The Three Sisters behind one of those locked doors. You remember the line "to Moscow?" It was the fate of Chekhov’s three sisters never to satisfy their dreams, but in the contemporary updating not getting there is a boon since it means our two feckless characters can remain in The Transit Zone!

Taking a Leak

Fifty years ago, if you said, “I want to be gay,” it would have meant that you aspired to a state of happiness. Today, if someone tells you they want to be gay, it means that they are coming out of the closet. Now, the expression “I want to take a leak” is being threatened by the exigencies of modern electronic warfare carried out by digital-age mercenaries. If someone tells you they want to take a leak or informs you that something is leaking, it has nothing to do with fluids emanating from the bladder or from a pipe, it has to do with classified information being uncovered and released to an older generation of news outlets. Everyone has been wondering about the fate of objective reportage, and whether the gathering of new information will become the province of amateur bloggers who have no real experience in employing reliable sources to report stories. Though there may be some reason for consternation about the latest evolution of reporting (particularly with regard to privacy issues), the fears of amateurism may be put to rest. Where you had Woodward and Bernstein covering the Watergate scandal, now you have sophisticated hackers capable of making their way into highly classified governmental systems that an older generation of journalists didn’t even dare speculate about. As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” First came the reporting about a US Army helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, and now comes the WikiLeak about what is really occurring in Afghanistan. “The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year,” the Times reported (“View is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan,” NYT, 7/25/10). The information, while not surprising, is striking in its detail, but more important, this is one of the clear-cut times when history is transformative in terms of information-gathering. Everyone has been wondering what is going to happen to newspapers, and which ones will start to charge for their online editions. Balderdash—for good or bad WikiLeaks is the new journalism, with transparency (a word that has also been bandied about by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) as the lingua franca and moral high ground of both political and journalistic life. Here is how the unfolding of the current front-page story is described in the print edition of the Times piece:  “The documents—some 92,000 individual reports in all—were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds…”