THE DALLAS HOUSE MONOGRAPHS

Series: The Global Crisis.

No 2: After Wikileaks: an Assessment of the Wikileaks phenomenon by JASON FERRIMAN

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This study aims to assess and analyse the recent emergence of Wikileaks and explore the eects that it has had on Media and the governing powernexus. It introduces the tool of bio-political assessment that brings with it the assertion that people are not divorced from events but that a clearer understanding of the people enveloped within an event can lead to a clear understanding of that event itself. Due to the brief length of the study, existing models of political understanding are used to substantiate the argument and they need to be recognised from the outset. C. Wright Mills 1953 book, entitled The Power Elite is used as a reference of understanding
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to elaborate on the above-mentioned powernexus. Bruce Sterlings essay The Blast Shack is an insiders reference to the world of hacking. Sterlings assessment of Wikileaks as a hacking phenomenon is unrivalled. This study aims to assess the Wikileaks aair from a dierent perspective to Sterlings, but his work has been used as a reference to locate the argument of this study. Ra Khatchadourians article No Secrets has been used as the primary reference tool for biographic information on Julian Assange due to this journalists direct access to the Wikileaks founder. A brief background to Wikileaks is given to place basic information about this organisation within the study. The Phenomenon of Wikileaks Simon Hansen, co-creator of the programme Deadtime, aired on E.tv in 1998 when they rst launched their platform in South Africa, gives an appropriate illustration to understand the Wikileaks phenomenon. Hansen describes how there was a part to the Deadtime format where they oered their
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audience the possibility to add their own content to the programme. Deadtime had oered the viewer a shift from being just a passive receiver of the programmes content to also being a partcreator of the material which they themselves viewed on television. Unknowingly, the Deadtime team had created a form of YouTube. But ten years too early. In 2005, YouTube the video sharing website entered the scene and created a shift in the way we use the Internet as well as later selling to Google for $1.65 billion. Deadtime disappeared and remained a fringe conceptual experiment. Deadtimes medium was television.Its participants needed physically to go to the studios in Cape Town to generate their content. This actually turned out to cause quite a problem as E.tv management complained to the Deadtime team about the trouble that these crowds queuing up outside the studios were causing. The audience was limited to South Africa. YouTubes medium is the Internet. Its participants can upload lm clips from their own computers at home. The audience was global. Timing and ready-technology, alongside the conceptual idea, is key to the breakthrough event or concept.
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A concept unrealised for twenty years Bruce Sterling, in his essay entitled The Blast Shack, gives some background to the phenomenon of hacking and explains that the conceptual idea for a Wikileaks was around for over twenty years. He describes an American hacker Timothy C. May and his written work The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto which includes: The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely. Sterling continues that May developed from this manifesto a hypothetical institution called BlackNet which might conceivably carry out these aims. An extract from the writings on BlackNet by May:
Your name has come to our attention. We have reason to believe [that] you may be interested in the products and services our new organisation, BlackNet, has to oer. BlackNet is in the business of buying, selling, trading, and otherwise dealing with information in all its many forms. We buy and sell
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information using public key cryptosystems with essentially perfect security for our customers. Unless you tell us who you are (please dont!) or inadvertently reveal information that provides clues, we have no way of identifying you, nor you of us. Our location in physical space is unimportant. Our location in cyberspace is the PGP key location: BlackNetnowhere@cyberspace.nil and we can be contacted preferably through a chain of anonymous remailers by encrypting a message to our public key (contained below) and depositing this message in one of several locations in cyberspace [which] we monitor. Currently, we monitor the following locations: alt.extropians, alt.fan.david-sternlight, and the cypherpunks mailing list. BlackNet is nominally non-ideological, but considers nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like to be relics of the pre-cyberspace era. Export and patent laws are often used to explicitly project national power and imperialist, colonialist state fascism. BlackNet believes it is solely the responsibility of a secret holder to keep that secret not the responsibility of the State, or of us, or of anyone else who may come into possession of that secret.
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If a secrets worth having, its worth protecting.

But nothing came of this BlackNet idea, and it remained more of an interesting cyber-hacker postulation than anything else. Although the primary transactions proposed are commercially driven, it is about secure information exchange. Importantly, this concept clearly remained in the domain of hacking and never managed to bridge to other zones of activity, never mind meet the world of Media. Over two decades needed to pass before something like it became real. Sterling later describes the subculture of hacking: I used to meet and write about hackers, crackers, darkside hackers and computer underground types [] but once you get used to their many eccentricities, there is nothing particularly remote or mysterious or romantic about them. They are banal [] Crypto guys mostly well-educated, mathematically gifted middle-aged guys in Silicon Valley careers are geeks.Theyre [mostly] harmless geeks, theyre not radical politicians or dashing international crime gures. One of a hackers primary activities is the access of seemingly inaccessible information. Jonathan James, the rst juvenile in the US to be sent
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to jail for hacking, said, I was just looking around, playing around. What was fun for me was a challenge to see what I could pull o. He broke into the US Department of Defense and NASAs computer systems. He did, however, steal NASA software to supplement his studies in C programming. He was banned from recreational computer use and was forced to serve a six-month sentence under house arrest with probation. He only later served six months in prison because of a violation of his parole. In many instances when a hacker is caught, governments (or later corporations) solicit him as a white-hat or ethical hacker and use his skills to test the integrity of their computer systems. Sterling does inform us that, Its [generally] hard to charge hackers with crimes, even when they gleefully commit them, because its hard to nd prosecutors and judges willing to bone up on the drudgery of understanding what they did. Generally, information access and acquisition by hackers is for personal viewing or showing o to their clique as a trophy. In the period before the Wikileaks phenomenon, the few people who were capable of attaining this secure information did not have the inner drive or the political will
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to disseminate it beyond their realm, nor was there yet an accessible mass audience to project it to. What was key for this to break out of the realm of hacking and crypting and emerge into the phenomenon that would become Wikileaks were two more elements: the person Julian Assange and the development of an accessible Internet mass audience. A short bio-political assessment of Julian Assange Julian Assange was born in 1971, in Townsville, a coastal city in north-eastern Australia. No information has been found about his father. His mother left home at the age of 17. His paternal lineage is said to derive from Ah Sang, a Chinese migr who settled on Thursday Island o the coast of Australia in the early 19th century and whose descendants later moved to the mainland. His maternal lineage is from Scotland and Ireland, people who moved to Australia in the mid-19th century. His family life growing up was quite unstable and involved moving around a lot. Shortly after his rst birthday, Assanges mother married a theatre director and the couple
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collaborated on theatre productions travelling around Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island. By the time Assange was 14 years old he had moved 37 times. When he was eight years old his mother divorced his stepfather and began seeing a musician, with whom she had a second son. When she separated from this relationship there emerged a ght for the custody of their child. With the threat of losing Assanges stepbrother and that this musician would just take him, she ed with her children, Assange living on the run from the age of eleven until sixteen. Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer, he told journalist Ra Khatchadourian, I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went shing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels. At the age of 18, Assange married his pregnant girlfriend in an unocial ceremony and had a son soon after. Within two years she divorced him, leaving with their child. He and his mother fought for full-custody of his son. They alleged that his son was not safe in the new family setting but the states child-protection agency, the Health and Community Services, disagreed. This custody battle then evolved into a battle against the state. Assange, his mother, and a third person created
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an organisation called The Parent Inquiry into Child Protection. Khatchadourian describes how The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they distributed yers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to come forward with inside information, for a central databank that they were creating. In 1999, after nearly three-dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Assanges education was mostly informal, as his mother believed that, formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority on her children and dampen their will to learn and also obviously because they moved so frequently. He was home-schooled, took correspondence classes and studies informally with university professors but mostly read on his own I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail. A key part of Julian Assanges education was his learning how to use computer software. Khatchadourian describes, While on the run, Claire [an assumed name of Assanges mother given by this journalist] rented a house across the street from
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an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. The austerity of ones interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me, he said. It is like chess chess is very austere, in that you dont have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard. When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet this was 1987 but computer networks and telecom systems were suciently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teenagers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Later, in his twenties, Assange studied physics at the University of Melbourne. Assanges beliefs and ideologies from the information gathered are predominantly humanist. As a self-proclaimed student of Kafka, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that human ideals and potentiality are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, by patronage networks one of his favourite expressions according to journalist Khatchadourian that contort the
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human spirit. He read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns The First Circle three times, later writing: How close [it is] to my adventures! He collaborated on a book called Underground with Suelette Dreyfuss and wrote a manifesto-type document entitled, Conspiracy as Governance. Ken Day, the lead investigator of the Australian Federal polices Operation Weather which pursued Assange and his hacking team, relayed to journalist Ra Khatchadourian about Assange that, He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything. He had come to understand the dening human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. Assanges childhood included physical activity (horse riding, raft building, general adventuring) to indicate an average or better-than-average health. He has a deep baritone voice and speaks in a slow and measured manner. As an adult, Assanges skin is pale. His hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all colour soon after the conclusion of the three-year custody battle with his ex-wife. About this period of his life, Assanges mother elaborated, We had
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experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it all nished I ended up with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: it was like coming back from a war. You just cant interact with normal people to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that is untreated. From this and other family accounts, Assange burnt out at this time, still in his early twenties. Following this he lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes and whose bites scarred his face. There are accounts of long periods of not eating and sleeping, particularly during his marathonic periods of programming. During Assanges trial when he was prosecuted for 31 counts of hacking and related crime, he briey checked himself into a hospital for depression. He tried to stay back with his mother but after a few days took to sleeping in nearby parks. The nances of Assange are not well documented but he has held various jobs. He does not seem to have great wealth or access to it. From research conducted, it does not appear that Assange has used his hacking skills to solicit funds. Not much indicates a broad social arena. Assange
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joined two hackers to create a group known as the International Subversives. His faction mostly appears to be around fellow-hackers. This network was a key part in the formation of Wikileaks. One of the denitive events in Assanges life was being pursued and then persecuted for hacking by the Australian Federal Police. In his No Secrets article, Ra Khatchadourian writes that, In September 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. The International Subversives incursions into Nortel turned out to be a critical development for Operation Weather. Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the states reaction confounding. But the other members
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of the group decided to cooperate. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-ve charges and six were dropped. But at his nal sentencing the judge said, There is just no evidence that there was anything other than a sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to whats the expression surf through these various computers. Assanges only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages. The Internets development in the last twenty years The other key element to the timing of the Wikileaks phenomenon was the development of the Internet to a point where after 18 years the World Wide Web, as described by Wired magazine, had been eclipsed by Skype, Netix, peer-to-peer and a quarter-million other apps. They continue in their article The Web is Dead cowritten by Chris Anderson and Michael Wol:
You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad thats one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter and the New York Times three more apps. On the way to the oce, you listen to a podcast on your smart-phone. Another app. At
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work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netixs streaming service. Youve spent the day on the Internet but not on the Web. This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. Its driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and its a world Google cant crawl, one where HTML doesnt rule. And its the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because theyre rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or t better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they dont go to the screen). The fact that its easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cemented the trend, producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.

This shift in the World Wide Web over the last two decades particularly allowed access to a larger, more mainstream audience and produced the zone where hacking could meld with Media.
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The emergence of social networking allowed for an amplication of Wikileaks work. In a podcast interview with Time magazine over Skype, Assange said: The bulk of the heavy lifting heavy analytical lifting that is done with our materials is done by us, and is done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human-rights activists. It is not done by the broader community. However, once the initial lifting is done, once a story becomes a story, becomes a news article, then we start to see community involvement, which digs deeper and provides more perspective. So the social networks tend to be, for us, an amplier of what we are doing. A brief background to Wikileaks Wikileaks is a media organisation that was started in 2006 by Sunshine Publishing and founded by Assange. Its stated aim was to bring important news and information to the public. This is based on the method of a high-security electronic drop box coupled with cryptographic technology to give a secure and anonymous way for sources to send information to Wikileaks. Written material about these subjects is then published, alongside the source material, on the
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website. The similarity in name to Wikipedia has come from Wikileaks use of the same content presentation style. Unlike Wikipedia, however, editing of the content on the Wikileaks site is no longer open to the public. The Wikileaks.org site now is currently inaccessible but mirror sites allow its content to be viewed. According to Julian Assanges own explanation, the site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider, PSE.se, which was created to be secure from both legal and digital attack, and which, through Swedens basic law Grundlag on the freedom of print information, also guarantees the anonymity of sources in digital media. Submissions are rst routed to PSE, then to a second Wikileaks server in another country, followed by going to a third server in further country that has other benecial laws. This entire digital channel, along with the submitted information, is encrypted and kept anonymous by way of a modied version of the Tor network. (The Tor Project is a free network with open software that primarily protects its users from a common form of Internet surveillance called trac analysis by creating virtual tunnels of data transmission, which are extremely private). Added to this, Wikileaks computers send huge
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volumes of other articial submissions through these channels alongside the genuine ones. There are vulnerabilities, says Assange, but it is vastly more secure than any banking network. While preparing the launch of the site, some of the Wikileaks team who owned a server that was used as one of the nodes for the Tor network, made a discovery. By observing the trac passing through it, they discovered that Chinese hackers were using the Tor network for the transportation of appropriated foreign government information, and so recorded it. A portion of this acquired data served as Wikileaks.orgs foundational launch data and statistic of over one million documents from thirteen countries. Following this, in December 2006, Wikileaks posted its rst sourced document. Some of the stories accompanied by their source material have included: A US Special Forces manual on how to prop up unpopular governments using paramilitaries (El Salvador to Iraq) The publication of 10,000 pages from a secret contract between the German Federal
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government and the Toll Collect consortium. They are a private operator group for the heavy vehicle tolling system. A CIA report into possible public relations strategies aimed to gain public support in Germany and France for a continued war in Afghanistan. Strategy documents in the Somali war and a play for Chinese support. A $3 billion Kenyan presidential corruption exposed its former President Daniel Arap Moi. The condential exposure analysis of 205 companies that each owe above 45 million to the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. A publication of censored documents that reveal a number of elaborate international tax avoidance schemes by the SCM (Structured Capital Markets) division of Barclays. Documents that show how Julius Baer, the largest private Swiss bank, avoids paying tax to the Swiss government.
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But it was the release of a 38-minute piece of classied military cockpit footage (and related supporting documents) from Iraq in 2007 and the three waves of further released documents, including the 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables (reputedly the largest set of condential documents ever to be released into the public domain) that propelled Wikileaks into the public media arena. The rst involved video footage taken from the camera (and including the chatter between the aircrews and ground units involved) mounted on an US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter during an operation in New Baghdad, Baghdad, in 2007. This contained two consecutive incidents where twelve adults were killed (including two Reuters employees, Namir-Noor-Eldden and his driver Saeed Chmagh), and two children wounded; and a third where civilians were killed in the building targeted by the helicopters hellre missiles including the women and children living there and a person walking on the footpath. Reuters persevered unsuccessfully for three years to obtain the video footage of this incident from the US army under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although material of the incident
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was shown to Reuters editors in Baghdad in an o-the-record brieng, when copies were requested in order to review an incident that held apparent inconsistencies and also further related information, they were denied. The cause of their deaths is unclear. The US military issued a statement describing the incident as a reght with insurgents and said the killings were being investigated. Witnesses interviewed by Reuters said they saw no gunmen in the immediate area and that there had been a US helicopter attack, which police described as random American bombardment. Reuters, 12th July 2007 No further copies or information were, however, made available or seen again until Wikileaks released the material. From the 38-minute source material,the Wikileaks team edited an 18-minute piece that they named Murder Collateral. This was publicly launched at the National Press Club in Washington on 5th April 2010 to about 40 journalists. The video in both raw and edited formats was released on a Wikileaks site, as well as on YouTube and a number of other websites. After the press
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conference, Al Jazeeras Washington Bureau approached Assange for interview. MSNBC and major newspapers around the world covered the story. On YouTube alone, more than 7 million viewers have watched the footage. Assange describes the footage by saying that This video shows what modern warfare has become and, I think, after seeing it, whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that resulted during ghting with close air support, they will understand what is going on. The video also makes clear that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even mentioned. Later, In July 2010, Wikileaks published The Afghan War Diary, a compilation of approximately 91,731 documents about the war in Afghanistan, January 2004 until December 2009. In October The Iraq War Logs was published from 391,832 US Army eld reports. The fourth publication, and the one that ballooned Wikileaks media presence, was the November 28th publishing of 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables. Dubbed Cablegate, the cables,
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which date from 1966 up until the end of February in 2010, contain condential communications between 274 embassies around the world and the State Department in Washington DC. About this, the Wikileaks team wrote on their website: This document release reveals the contradictions between the USs public persona and what it says behind closed doors and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reect their wishes, they should ask to see whats going on behind the scenes. The documents were released and supplied to the major commercial media organisations. Wikileaks as a Media phenomenon Wikileaks can be validly assessed as a hacker phenomenon the greatest public hacker scandal so far. Assessed from this view, Sterling points to the core anomaly: In [the US State Department] setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of ocial condentiality. Thats the real issue, thats the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks dont mix any more. Its like trying to eat a very private birthday cake
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while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and thats Julian Assange. But when Wikileaks is assessed not as a hacking phenomenon but rather as a Media phenomenon, the insights are more penetrating. From this assessment, Wikileaks has bent the Media power structure. The phenomenon of Wikileaks has broken a new frontier in Media. Already Al Jazeera has released the Palestine Papers, their self-professed Wikileaks-like documents (1,700 of them) that focus on their editorial staple, the Israeli-Palestinian conict. John Lloyd, in a recent Financial Times article, denes three developments in the journalism of 2010 that convey Medias power as, the takeover of US politics by the broadcast media; the revelations about governments around the world from the Wikileaks website, and The Daily Telegraph expos of business secretary Vince Cables true feelings about the UK coalition government. Wikileaks here is the only non-corporate, nonlarge-scale Media organisation. And it is not the specic of Assanges Wikileaks the information being leaked but rather the phenomenon of Wikileaks that bent the
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Media power structure. Like YouTube, there is now already a before-Wikileaks and an afterWikileaks. Already other Wikileaks have spawned Brusseleaks, Indoleaks, Balkanleaks and OpenLeaks are just some. The Wikileaks phenomenon is here. These sites are either making the Wikileaks material available in their countries or oering themselves as conduits for new submissions relating to their countries. Not all are very secure but the aim remains the same: to act as repositories for leaked information to be placed on the public domain. Indoleaks focuses on releasing documents relating to Indonesia. Their site has so far released documents on the Lapindo mudow, a MoU between Indonesian government and Microsoft Corporation, and conversations between Richard Nixon and former President Suharto. The Bulgarian site Balkanleaks, set up by the expatriate Atanas Chobanov, aims to expose organised crime and political corruption in the Balkan states. Their team are also trying to develop distributed architecture for the Wikileaks site which would eliminate the need for hosting providers and hardware servers.

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Brusseleaks, formed by former EU ocials and journalists, intends to focus on obtaining and publishing leaked internal information about the backroom dealings and secrets of the EU. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former Wikileaks second-in-command, left Wikileaks last September, along with a team, to create his own leaks-focused site, OpenLeaks. Whereas Wikileaks both receives anonymous submissions and publishes them, OpenLeaks aims to solely focus on being an anonymous submissions channel. In an interview with Forbes Andy Greenberg, Domscheit-Berg explains:
Like Wikileaks, the new site will allow leakers to anonymously submit information to a secure electronic drop box. [] Instead, it will allow the source to designate any media or non-governmental organizations he or she chooses and have that information passed on for fact checking, redaction and publication. OpenLeaks will integrate with the organisations it passes information to, functioning as a secure tip box on their sites. Those organisations can
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choose to store leaked information on their own servers or leave it in the hands of OpenLeaks. All this is cryptographically separated in a fashion that everyone has their own dedicated part of the system. The project aims to initially partner with ve newspapers worldwide, but also expand to anyone who wants to participate. Newspapers, NGOs, labor unions, anyone who wants to receive information from anonymous sources, we enable all these people to run something like this.

Although OpenLinks is a retardation of Wikileaks (by not getting involved in the publishing of submitted material) this site and others are part of the Wikileaks phenomenon and the post-Wikileaks era just like YouTube with its spin-os. Mediaparts Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel argues that Wikileaks has opened a battle over the future of freedom of information. He says, It pitches the fundamental right of the public to access information against the stranglehold on information hitherto exercised by governing powers and establishments. At stake is whether the alliance of economic interests and national
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powers-that-be can snu out the future of democratic ideals spurred by the tools of the digital age. Two key points in the above statement are his indication here of power, an overlapping powernexus, and the digital age tools of Media. Mediapart are themselves part of the evolution of Media aided by the technological advances of the Internet. They recently joined as media partners to Wikileaks. They are a French onlineonly investigative newspaper, founded in 2008 by the former editorial director of Le Monde, Edwy Plenel, and part of a new model of Media that is shaking up the traditional French press, itself reeling after years of falling circulation and deteriorating advert sales. Patrick Eveno of Sorbonne University describes the traditional French media landscape: The traditional press is so asphyxiated by nancial problems that it is not doing its job as a check on power. Sites like Mediapart can take more risks because they are independent and dont have to worry about their owners. Even as they lose readers and advertisers, French papers are saddled with higher salaries and costs than in
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other European countries. Many of the failing French daily newspapers have been acquired by larger industrial groups, often owned by business tycoons with close ties to politicians. For example, Le Figaro is part of the business empire of Serge Dassault, an arms dealer tycoon and personal friend of President Sarkozy. Sarkozys close friendships with traditional Media owners and his control of state-funded TV and radio platforms have often allowed him to shape news coverage and isolate journalists or editors who threaten him. But is was the breaking of Laaire Bettencourt by Mediapart that placed it in the centre of a scandal that has stretched from French business into top political circles, from a cabinet minister to French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself. Mediapart steadily broke stories, posted leaks, oered downloadable versions of wire-tapped conversations and published interviews with well-placed sources. Their reports set the agenda on the Bettencourt Aair, forcing the rest of French media to follow. What is the Media power structure that Wikileaks has bent? The event which best illustrated this power structure as well as its
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relationship with the overlapping power-nexus indicated by Mediaparts Edwy Plenel earlier, was Rolling Stones magazines article on General Stanley McChrystal. But rst, insight from C. Wright Mills piercing 1953 study of American society is required to give locus and understanding to the landscape of power. Although it was a study specic to America, it also mapped a patterning that is globally relevant as a power model. Mills did not include Media as a power domain in his analysis (and its inclusion could strongly be argued) but it is the patterning of the overlapping power-nexus that is important for further understanding of what eect Wikileaks has had on todays power structure. A Power Elite In his book The Power Elite, Mills denes both a triad of power (Economic, Political and Military) and a power elite. And to avoid deviation to a conspiratorial conceptualisation of this analysis, the reader must please remember that both this power triad and the power elite is in no way foreign but has existed in society since Rome. The non-teaching of Roman Classics
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has merely precluded both an awareness and an understanding of this.

The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organisations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the eective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity, which they enjoy. The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinionmakers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle levels of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region.
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The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of aairs know but will not tell. Such men hold quite various theories about their own roles in the sequence of event and decision. Often they are uncertain about their roles, and even more often they allow their fears and their hopes to aect their assessment of their own power. No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistances of others to its use. Moreover, most American men of aairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it. The personal awareness of the actors is only one of the several sources one must examine in order to understand the higher circles. Yet many who believe that there is no elite, or at any rate none of any consequence, rest their argument upon what men of aairs believe about themselves, or at least assert in public. Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains. Other institutions seem o to the side of modern history, and, on occasion, duly subordinated to these. No family is as directly powerful in national aairs as any major corporation; no church is as directly powerful in
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the external biographies of young men in America today as the military establishment; no college is as powerful in the shaping of momentous events as the National Security Council. Religious, educational, and family institutions are not autonomous centres of national power; on the contrary, these decentralized areas are increasingly shaped by the big three, in which developments of decisive and immediate consequence now occur. Within each of the big three, the typical institutional unit has become enlarged, has become administrative, and, in the power of its decisions, has become centralized. Behind these developments there is a fabulous technology, for as institutions, they have incorporated this technology and guide it, even as it shapes and paces their developments. The economy once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions. The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment
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which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure. The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy eciency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain. In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced; within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up. As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its trac with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously aect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the
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other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to moneymaking. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. On each side of the world-split running through central Europe and around the Asiatic rim lands, there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures. If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present. The fact of the interlocking is clearly revealed at each of the points of crisis of modern capitalist societyslump, war, and boom. In each, men of decision are led to an awareness of the interdependence of the major institutional orders. In the nineteenth century, when the scale of all institutions was smaller, their liberal integration was achieved in the automatic economy, by an autonomous play of market forces, and in the automatic political domain, by the bargain and the vote. It was then assumed that out of the imbalance and friction that followed the limited decisions then possible a new equilibrium would in due course emerge. That
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can no longer be assumed, and it is not assumed by the men at the top of each of the three dominant hierarchies. For given the scope of their consequences, decisions and indecisions in any one of these ramify into the others, and hence top decisions tend either to become coordinated or to lead to a commanding indecision. It has not always been like this. When numerous small entrepreneurs made up the economy, for example, many of them could fail and the consequences still remained local; political and military authorities did not intervene. But now, given political expectations and military commitments, can they aord to allow key units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump? Increasingly, they do intervene in economic aairs, and as they do so, the controlling decisions in each order are inspected by agents of the other two, and economic, military, and political structures are interlocked. At the pinnacle of each of the three enlarged and centralized domains, there have arisen those higher circles which make up the economic, the political, and the military elites. At the top of the economy, among the corporate rich, there are the chief executives; at the top of the political order,
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the members of the political directorate; at the top of the military establishment, the elite of soldierstatesmen clustered in and around the Joint Chiefs of Sta and the upper echelon. As each of these domains has coincided with the others, as decisions tend to become total in their consequence, the leading men in each of the three domains of power the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate tend to come together, to form the power elite of America.

Key to Rolling Stone magazines article The Runaway General on General Stanley McChrystal was its response. General McChrystal was red from his position as Commander of the US forces in Afghanistan and the author and publisher were attacked by mainstream media. CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logans attack on Michael Hastings on CNNs program Reliable Sources brings understanding of the Media power structure and its relationship to the power triad dened by Mills. Incidentally, Logan is married to Joseph Burkett, a US defence contractor. Logan began her attack on Hastings with a critique casting doubt on his claim that his
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interviews with McCrystal and his team were all on-the-record. She stated: Michael Hastings, if you believe him, says that there were no ground rules laid out. And, I mean, that doesnt really make a lot of sense to me. I mean, I know these people. They never let their guard down like that. To me something doesnt add up here. I just I dont believe it. Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz asked Logan, Is there an unspoken agreement that youre not going to embarrass [the US military] by reporting insults and banter? Absolutely, she said. Yesthere is an element of trust. Logan was not questioning whether Hastings reporting was accurate or not, but whether he had permission to quote McChrystal in the manner that he did. And she then unknowingly revealed a secret. To be fair to the military, if they believe that a piece is balanced, they will let you back. An adjunct voice of the power-nexus as opposed to honesty, accuracy or a critical outlook is what Media has overtly become today.
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To be fair to journalism, Logans view was not universally endorsed. Frank Rich of the New York Times declared Michael Hastings article an impressive feat of journalism by a Washington outsider who seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than most insiders did. It is not a surprise that the major Media networks missed the signs leading to the nancial crash. The Wikileaks phenomenon has revealed that mainstream Media acts more as a guardian for the entrenched power domains than as an independent check on their power. As Assange succinctly asked, How is it that a team of ve people managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? Wikileaks as a political phenomenon The core to understanding the Wikileaks eect is that it revealed a ssure crack in the powernexus its inherent structuralism. The truth is that all the leaked information that Wikileaks has revealed is neither that revelatory nor groundbreaking, and to focus on this information
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is to misunderstand its political eect (and why Assange is being attacked from the strangest of corners and with the strangest of methods his Swedish rape trial previously thrown out of by Swedish judiciary). It is that Wikileaks has exposed the inherent structuralism of todays power-nexus. Since the French Revolution, structuralist-rule has dominated people-rule, with Napoleon the great architect of the modern State, and with the Financial elite the successors to the Church. The structuralism of the US State Departments SIPRnet programme was overcome by its own structure. That is the heart of the Wikileaks aair. As Bruce Sterling succinctly describes, Wikileaks is merely an anti-SIPRnet. According to a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin published in The Washington Post, an estimated 854,000 people at the time held top secret security clearance more than 1.5 times the population of Washington, D.C. The top-secret world the government [created during the Cold War epochs successor the War On Terror] has become so large, so unwieldy and
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so secretive, the Washington Post concluded, that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. The result of this classication-structuralism is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public. Wikileaks merely broke this division.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books 1. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford Press (1956). 2. Various, edited by Peter Ludlow, High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, MIT Press (1996).

Articles 1. Ra Khatchadourian, No Secrets, The New Yorker Magazine ( June 2010).

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2. Chris Anderson and Michael Wol, The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet, Wired Magazine (August 2010). 3. John Lloyd, The new power of the press Financial Times (7th January 2011). 4. Edwy Plenel, Why we must join in the battle for Wikileaks, www.mediapart.fr. 5. Michael Hastings, The Runaway General, Rolling Stone Magazine ( June 2010). 6. Bruce Sterling, The Blast Shack, www. webstock.org.nz.

Blogs 1. Andy Greenbergs Blog, The Firewall, www.forbes.com. 2. Frank Richs Blog,The Op-Ed Columnist, www.nytimes.com.

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Websites 1. www.techcrunch.com 2. www.rawhack.com 3. www.wikileaks.info 4. www.reuters.com 5. www.newswatch.in 6. www.thehungtonpost.com 7. www.tor.org

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