Why WikiLeaks Can't Be Stopped

Historical precedents suggest that, whatever the negative consequences, there's nothing anyone can do to kill WikiLeaks.

I remember the day 10 years ago when a neighbour's daughter whispered to me about this new piece of software called Napster that let you download music files for free. I tried it and, in late 2000, shifted to high-speed cable, along with hundreds of thousands of other internet users. Around that same time, the American recording industry declared war on these peer-to-peer (P2P) services, and users were compared to everything from criminals to communists, not always inaccurately.

These days, P2P is all a bit old hat; while many of the first and second generation services disappeared under the entertainment industry's legal onslaught, they were immediately replaced by nimbler successors. Now everyone under 50 uses them, and nobody I know personally has bought a CD in the last five years.

Of course, the technology involved is very different, but the story of Napster 2000 has many parallels to the story of WikiLeaks 2010, and the lessons gleaned from that earlier episode apply today.

The first and most obvious lesson is that morality aside, you can't kill it. For the last several weeks, the world has watched our leaders play whack-a-mole with the WikiLeaks website; the only result has been word of WikiLeaks competitors has begun to emerge. Furthermore, if all of these were successfully driven from the internet, a simple zipped file stuffed with secrets could be released on to the various interlocking P2P networks noted above. And beneath all of this, in the very depths of the cyberspace, Ian Clarke's FreeNet – which was originally designed to facilitate exactly this kind of whistleblowing – lies in wait as the host of last resort.

The second important lesson is that if you can't kill it, you shouldn't bother trying. Most of those who have criticized the various calls for Julian Assange's death have done so on the grounds that the incitements are criminal and immoral.

Less has been made of the fact that creating a martyr for the hacker community – either in the form of Mr. Assange or his organization – would be profoundly stupid. The death (i.e., shutdown) of Napster did nothing but unleash a storm of technical innovation bent on thwarting the authority of record companies that ordered the very same shutdown. And here we are 10 years later with file-trading still flourishing and the music industry, by its own admission, in terminal decline.

And here's the thing: during its last days of existence, Napster executives were in furious negotiations with the major record labels, and their business case could be described as, “Après moi, le déluge.” With us, you will get something; after us, the file-sharing world will fragment, and you will be unable to negotiate with the pieces.

I believe that the international community is facing the exact same situation with regards to WikiLeaks. It would be a much wiser course to negotiate with WikiLeaks, or perhaps one of its emergent rivals, towards an ethical protocol for the leaking of future documents. Otherwise, instead of files appearing with names redacted, we will have pure document dumps onto obscure Mongolian servers with no concern at all for whose interests might be damaged.

In other words, the international community ought to negotiate its own surrender rather than face a rout.

Finally, the ongoing WikiLeaks saga bears a number of resemblances to the CRU Hack of 2009, in which private e-mails written by U.K. and American climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia, and uploaded onto a server in Russia.

The content of these e-mails proved embarrassing for the scientists responsible, but ultimately trivial. More importantly, in the aftermath of the event a number of arguments against this kind of disclosure were made that prefigured the kind we are hearing today.

Scientists, it was argued then, will literally produce less science if their every utterance is held up for scrutiny. Diplomats, it is argued now, will be unable to do their jobs if some of the advice they give is not allowed to remain secret.

Today, as in 2009, the public response to such arguments has been the equivalent of a disinterested shrug. Millions of people read the stolen e-mails; millions more are now reading the leaked cables. It appears that we are headed towards an age of “enforced transparency,” wherein anyone that knows anything will be forced to disclose what they know.

The internet has already made it clear that humans have an insatiable desire for music and pornography. Now add to these a third thing: secrets.