(Following article was written on July 20 2010)
This blog entry is for all the people that would like to silence Julian Assange and his wikileaks. It is the secret hint to not only silence Assange but possibly destroy wikileaks completely with a very simple, yet unimaginable effective move. Now – my hint is so elegant that some of you might doubt it at first or feel as if beeing not taken seriously, but... nothing could be farther from the truth! Let it sink in, think about it and then ask yourself: is it true? Is it doable? If both answers should be yes, then it's your decision to act upon it or to choose consciously to not act upon it for whatever reason.
Furthermore: following my proposal could in addition have the effect that you get unprecedented political and or social power. A lot of power. And quick. Quicker than you ever thought. But remember: with power comes also responsibility. And using a hint successfully before paying the one that gave it to you should defenitely humble you.
Ready? Here we go...
What is it, that makes Wikileaks so vigorous? An Analysis.
First let's inquire, what it is, that makes Wikileaks such a powerful movement. And why this might be threatening the one or the other. So, what are Wikileaks most powerful weapons? First and foremost it is truthfulness. They try to their best extend to have at any time, in any place the - for a human beeing - highest possible grade of truthfulness. Combined with high social values and trustworthiness this is a very strong weapon, as nobody can change what is right now, right here, already true. You cannot make it anymore untrue as it is already true and in the next moment it is too late to make untrue what was true a moment before. And people know that. They know, that something in a given moment now or in the past is or was true. Even if the same thing or opinion or state should not be true anymore in the future. People – you and me – feel it, with an instinct like animals. And to most people on this planet, truthfullness is something good. Something sexy. Something to be wanted. Something to be searched for. Something extremely valuable.
But thats not enough. Truth is a fragile good, so you need to secure the space to deliver it. That's what Wikileaks does. «Why?» you ask me? Well, because they want to. And more importantly because they can! Because they have the power to just do it. So thats the second main weapon of Wikileaks: they have the tools to secure certain spaces to let truth be seen. This space is mainly the internet. And as they have one space where they can keep it openly and safely to be seen for everybody, they get another weapon for free: they can talk about it in real life («real life» as in contrast to «virtual life» / «internet» / «cyberspace»). And everybody can independently check the proof in the virtual world for him- / herself.
But why does this work so well? What are the mechanics behind it? There are several mechanics behind it, here is one of the most important: The number of people, who want to keep really important things classified is very small. We are talking about really important things here. Not about those people, that want to keep it a secret, that they still pick their nose. But people, that keep things a secret, that concern a lot of people, folks, countries or even humanity as a whole. So there is a small number of interests to keep important things secret and a huge number of interests, that want to uncover those secrets and therefore cover Wikileaks back.
What are possible strategies to defeat Wikileaks?
And here begins my (reverse engineering) strategy. I will give you in the next lines the knowledge and tools to defeat Julian Assange and if a big enough number of people follow it, it might be strong enough to take Wikileaks down. To completely destroy it. Here we go:
So, this is the situation: you have a strong opponent in front of you, with strong weapons and a huge network of people supporting him. What are strategies to disempower him? As every excellent samurai knows, there are several: a) your weapons have to become stronger than your opponents weapons (including the skills to handle them), b) in addition you can try to disarm your opponent, c) and or you either look for an even bigger amount of people to support you or you convince more than fifty percent of your opponents followers to change sides to yours or you persuade them to not support your opponent anymore so that your own followers group grows bigger relatively to your opponent's one and or d) you get out of the reach of your opponent by either physically or mentally leaving the space your opponent occupies or – in the most extreme samurai worst case – by killing your opponent or yourself. No more opponent, no more threat. Last but not least there is another solution, a sweeping one, an sovereign one, an elegant and genius one, that I will introduce you to...
Now lets analyze how this knowledge could effect Wikileaks and Julian Assange. At the same time, this analysis gives us a more complete understanding why Wikileaks / Assanges weapons and strategies are so powerful... But we can learn from that and use it for ourselves…
A quick look shows us, that some of the above mentioned «disempowering strategies» are near to impossible to implement: dying – I suppose – is not an option.
The internet, as we use it today, is mainly one space. Moving out of that space is also not an option because it is an too important daily tool and would weaken our action radius dramatically and at the same time not stopping Wikileaks to spread the information to people close to us, that we are confronted with on a daily basis.
Physically avoiding Wikileaks doesn't do the trick either, because it is not their physicality, that is threatening but unphysical information that is made public and then spread over the whole planet by Wikileaks. Stopping them from spreading this information is a near to impossible job either because they are the kings in virtual space: they are the superhackers and to gather the people and the knowledge to support us would take years and years and too much energy... especially because their supporter group grows very fast and would be always bigger than ours.
Taking down the physical stations as holders of their virtual space would be the first thing seemingly in reach but – on close examination – wouldn't work either because of several reasons: we would have to take all physical servers down. Only one server working will continue feeding their product, classified information, into the net. In addition the server locations are probably dozens and kept secret. And even if we found them, there would be legislative burdens because of the different countries jurisdictions. In addition Wikileaks would connect new, hidden servers to the net at the speed of our finding them and taking them down. So: also not an option.
Which leads us to more dramatic moves: Taking the Wikileaks people physically out. This seems on first sight a stategy that could be put into practice. But there are some serious problems with that strategy: Julian Assange and his crew seem to be not too stupid, or, to put it in other words: quite clever. So they must have taken that option into consideration at least before publishing their «collateral murder»-video. Which makes this an very uncontrolled, uncontrollable plan. Wikileak-Members could for example have doubles representing them in public like presidents and actors have, too. It might even be possible that Julian Assange is not the head of the group but somebody completely unknown. How to find out if that is the case? And who exactly belongs to Wikileaks and who doesn't? Would it be enough to «permanently incapacitate» only one or two members of Wikileaks? Maybe. Maybe not! And if the first are incapacitated what would guarantee us, that Wikileaks hasn't held back the really, totally, shocking classified information that would transform citizens into a uncontrollable mob hunting you and your followers down? We see: a very risky, inelegant solution with the risk of far more damage than real solution. Which means: no good idea. Which means: no option either.
What is left of our strategy ideas? To increase your group of followers versus theirs? And yet again: the chance of success with this one is small. Very small. Why? As I said, because there are a lot, I mean a lot of people that want Assange to continue publishing, that are concerned about those classifieds, that desire full truth in contrast to the few that want those information kept secret. And as long as Wikileaks does nothing illegal or something that heavily threatens the security of us all, it would be hard to outnumber their supporters.
Which leaves us with strategies a) your weapons have to become stronger than your opponents weapons (including the skills to handle them) and b) in addition you can try to disarm your opponent. In fact, those two are the only realistic options to achieve our goal to combat and or silence Wikileaks.
Can Wikileaks be disarmed?
Let's start with the second one: disarming our opponent. This could be done in four different ways: For example: 1) prevent their (potential) sources from giving them any further sourcematerial, 2) taking all source material away from them, 3) identifying and propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material, 4) tricking them into publishing wrong or flawed source material and then propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material.
Let's have a look at those points one at a time:
2) Taking all source material away from them. It is not opinions or personal texts that Wikileaks publishes but usually copies (in text or image) of hard proof in form of hard copy or digital data never created by them themselves but leaked by insiders in the know. This info then is immediately spread not only on their servers but a big part of the internet communities servers as well. And as stated earlier: everybody understanding a little of information technology knows: what once was in the internet stays in the internet forever.
Additionally a combat within the internet is not really an option because they, Assange and Co., are the experts in that field, invincible it seems, so it would probably be very hard to hack their website – and all their friend's websites, too, of course – to take down all their publications as well as hindering them to publish them anew… There's also the danger, that an even more loosely organized network starts to republish the sources and thus publication gets even more decentralized than it is anyhow already.
3) Identifying and propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material. I'm sure this has been tried already. And I'm pretty positive, that Assange has seen that coming and has made damn sure all the published material is checked and double checked and nailed down very thoroughly. Airtight, so to speak.
4) Tricking them into publishing wrong or flawed source material and then propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material. This should be not so easy. Exactly because it is an obvious attack against the credibility of the WL-project and Assange most probably is very aware of that and will, as I said before, check and double check the material. I don't know how far they just check the documents / information / data leaked on their originality and how far they check the context in which they've been produced. So one possible attack could be to produce data in a very complex situation, then leak the data and some information which is on one hand true and verifiable but on the other gives a completely wrong picture about the data and it's source. Then let them publish it with the only very limited available information of the context. And reveal later the complete context of how the data occurred changing the complete picture of the whole thing. This would definitely harm Wikileaks but I very much doubt, that it would be a deadly strike for them…
So, what's really working then?
Which leaves us with our last option: weapons that are stronger than your opponents weapons. The problem with this one is: there doesn't exist something like «less true». Either something (idea, information, happening, theorie…) is true or it is untrue. Yes, there are different perspectives but it is very rare that something is true and untrue at the same time. And knowledge, insight and truth, sought and valued by so many people on this planet is a very powerful weapon. Probably one of the most powerful if not the most powerful. The very few more powerful ones could include something like the control over planetwide powers as: the power to kill all humanity, the power to control weather planetwide or important knowledge like the forseeing of when and where natural disasters will occur or the power to save all humanity from a disease or the power to take absolute control over the whole internet for an extended time etc. But most if not all of those powers are out of the average human beings reach.
This inevitably leads us to one preferred choice: using the same weapon as Assange and Wikileaks which could look like this:
1. First we cut their potential source material down by becoming totally transparent and by not producing any more secret data. Furthermore we start to make all secret data that we accumulated so far transparent or destroy it discretely. This lowers our own profile that could be attacked or be revealed by a leaker to zero.
2. Creating a save environment for data leaks to give Wikileaks some serious competition. Thus the focus gets shifted at least a little away from Wikileaks and some of its power shifts to you.
3. Start publishing more frequently and more relevant data than Wikileaks. As the Wikileak experiment shows there is a lot of people feeling urged to come out with the truth. Wikileaks is overloaded. This is one of Wikileaks weaknesses.
4. Get hold of a widespread medium like a big television channel and or a big newspaper and start publishing your material in a way that can be understood and estimated by the public. A lot of Wikileaks' data is too complex for the average citizen. That is another weak spot of Wikileaks to exploit. Also start to not only publish single, isolated data sources but show the deeper lines and connections to your readers and followers. How things fit together. The big picture so to speak. Create a Medium which can be consumed every day in about 20 minutes but reads in a way that is more captivating than all Steven King stories together, more deep than all philosopher's knowledge accumulated, that is more relevant to each citizen than anything he/she has stumbled upon in his/her entire life. And publish that material in an for everybody easily understandable form. Yes, this is possible. Make Wikileaks look like kids stuff compared to yours. Make WL publishings look like unimportant, boring chatter aside of your stories. Make Wikileaks history.
Roger Le Marié, 20 July 2010
This blog entry is for all the people that would like to silence Julian Assange and his wikileaks. It is the secret hint to not only silence Assange but possibly destroy wikileaks completely with a very simple, yet unimaginable effective move. Now – my hint is so elegant that some of you might doubt it at first or feel as if beeing not taken seriously, but... nothing could be farther from the truth! Let it sink in, think about it and then ask yourself: is it true? Is it doable? If both answers should be yes, then it's your decision to act upon it or to choose consciously to not act upon it for whatever reason.
Furthermore: following my proposal could in addition have the effect that you get unprecedented political and or social power. A lot of power. And quick. Quicker than you ever thought. But remember: with power comes also responsibility. And using a hint successfully before paying the one that gave it to you should defenitely humble you.
Ready? Here we go...
What is it, that makes Wikileaks so vigorous? An Analysis.
First let's inquire, what it is, that makes Wikileaks such a powerful movement. And why this might be threatening the one or the other. So, what are Wikileaks most powerful weapons? First and foremost it is truthfulness. They try to their best extend to have at any time, in any place the - for a human beeing - highest possible grade of truthfulness. Combined with high social values and trustworthiness this is a very strong weapon, as nobody can change what is right now, right here, already true. You cannot make it anymore untrue as it is already true and in the next moment it is too late to make untrue what was true a moment before. And people know that. They know, that something in a given moment now or in the past is or was true. Even if the same thing or opinion or state should not be true anymore in the future. People – you and me – feel it, with an instinct like animals. And to most people on this planet, truthfullness is something good. Something sexy. Something to be wanted. Something to be searched for. Something extremely valuable.
But thats not enough. Truth is a fragile good, so you need to secure the space to deliver it. That's what Wikileaks does. «Why?» you ask me? Well, because they want to. And more importantly because they can! Because they have the power to just do it. So thats the second main weapon of Wikileaks: they have the tools to secure certain spaces to let truth be seen. This space is mainly the internet. And as they have one space where they can keep it openly and safely to be seen for everybody, they get another weapon for free: they can talk about it in real life («real life» as in contrast to «virtual life» / «internet» / «cyberspace»). And everybody can independently check the proof in the virtual world for him- / herself.
But why does this work so well? What are the mechanics behind it? There are several mechanics behind it, here is one of the most important: The number of people, who want to keep really important things classified is very small. We are talking about really important things here. Not about those people, that want to keep it a secret, that they still pick their nose. But people, that keep things a secret, that concern a lot of people, folks, countries or even humanity as a whole. So there is a small number of interests to keep important things secret and a huge number of interests, that want to uncover those secrets and therefore cover Wikileaks back.
What are possible strategies to defeat Wikileaks?
And here begins my (reverse engineering) strategy. I will give you in the next lines the knowledge and tools to defeat Julian Assange and if a big enough number of people follow it, it might be strong enough to take Wikileaks down. To completely destroy it. Here we go:
So, this is the situation: you have a strong opponent in front of you, with strong weapons and a huge network of people supporting him. What are strategies to disempower him? As every excellent samurai knows, there are several: a) your weapons have to become stronger than your opponents weapons (including the skills to handle them), b) in addition you can try to disarm your opponent, c) and or you either look for an even bigger amount of people to support you or you convince more than fifty percent of your opponents followers to change sides to yours or you persuade them to not support your opponent anymore so that your own followers group grows bigger relatively to your opponent's one and or d) you get out of the reach of your opponent by either physically or mentally leaving the space your opponent occupies or – in the most extreme samurai worst case – by killing your opponent or yourself. No more opponent, no more threat. Last but not least there is another solution, a sweeping one, an sovereign one, an elegant and genius one, that I will introduce you to...
Now lets analyze how this knowledge could effect Wikileaks and Julian Assange. At the same time, this analysis gives us a more complete understanding why Wikileaks / Assanges weapons and strategies are so powerful... But we can learn from that and use it for ourselves…
A quick look shows us, that some of the above mentioned «disempowering strategies» are near to impossible to implement: dying – I suppose – is not an option.
The internet, as we use it today, is mainly one space. Moving out of that space is also not an option because it is an too important daily tool and would weaken our action radius dramatically and at the same time not stopping Wikileaks to spread the information to people close to us, that we are confronted with on a daily basis.
Physically avoiding Wikileaks doesn't do the trick either, because it is not their physicality, that is threatening but unphysical information that is made public and then spread over the whole planet by Wikileaks. Stopping them from spreading this information is a near to impossible job either because they are the kings in virtual space: they are the superhackers and to gather the people and the knowledge to support us would take years and years and too much energy... especially because their supporter group grows very fast and would be always bigger than ours.
Taking down the physical stations as holders of their virtual space would be the first thing seemingly in reach but – on close examination – wouldn't work either because of several reasons: we would have to take all physical servers down. Only one server working will continue feeding their product, classified information, into the net. In addition the server locations are probably dozens and kept secret. And even if we found them, there would be legislative burdens because of the different countries jurisdictions. In addition Wikileaks would connect new, hidden servers to the net at the speed of our finding them and taking them down. So: also not an option.
Which leads us to more dramatic moves: Taking the Wikileaks people physically out. This seems on first sight a stategy that could be put into practice. But there are some serious problems with that strategy: Julian Assange and his crew seem to be not too stupid, or, to put it in other words: quite clever. So they must have taken that option into consideration at least before publishing their «collateral murder»-video. Which makes this an very uncontrolled, uncontrollable plan. Wikileak-Members could for example have doubles representing them in public like presidents and actors have, too. It might even be possible that Julian Assange is not the head of the group but somebody completely unknown. How to find out if that is the case? And who exactly belongs to Wikileaks and who doesn't? Would it be enough to «permanently incapacitate» only one or two members of Wikileaks? Maybe. Maybe not! And if the first are incapacitated what would guarantee us, that Wikileaks hasn't held back the really, totally, shocking classified information that would transform citizens into a uncontrollable mob hunting you and your followers down? We see: a very risky, inelegant solution with the risk of far more damage than real solution. Which means: no good idea. Which means: no option either.
What is left of our strategy ideas? To increase your group of followers versus theirs? And yet again: the chance of success with this one is small. Very small. Why? As I said, because there are a lot, I mean a lot of people that want Assange to continue publishing, that are concerned about those classifieds, that desire full truth in contrast to the few that want those information kept secret. And as long as Wikileaks does nothing illegal or something that heavily threatens the security of us all, it would be hard to outnumber their supporters.
Which leaves us with strategies a) your weapons have to become stronger than your opponents weapons (including the skills to handle them) and b) in addition you can try to disarm your opponent. In fact, those two are the only realistic options to achieve our goal to combat and or silence Wikileaks.
Can Wikileaks be disarmed?
Let's start with the second one: disarming our opponent. This could be done in four different ways: For example: 1) prevent their (potential) sources from giving them any further sourcematerial, 2) taking all source material away from them, 3) identifying and propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material, 4) tricking them into publishing wrong or flawed source material and then propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material.
Let's have a look at those points one at a time:
1) Prevent their (potential) sources from giving them any further source material. This one could include to threaten (potential) sources or to keep sources involved in leaking classified information at a absolute minimum of maybe three persons in the know so you could investigate and hunt down a leaker. But the reality of complex information and systems often doesn't allow to keep sources at a minimum of three involved persons… And a part of Wikileak's strategy was and is to protect their sources with which they seem to have been very successful so far. Often they probably even don't know their sources. So it would probably be very hard to unveil and proove the true identity of a source and punish that source as a threat to other possible leakers. Also the ways of submitting leaks are far too many and far too diverse (digital, online, offline, hard copy, by snailmail, personally given …) to control all the channels for possible leaks.
Additionally a combat within the internet is not really an option because they, Assange and Co., are the experts in that field, invincible it seems, so it would probably be very hard to hack their website – and all their friend's websites, too, of course – to take down all their publications as well as hindering them to publish them anew… There's also the danger, that an even more loosely organized network starts to republish the sources and thus publication gets even more decentralized than it is anyhow already.
3) Identifying and propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material. I'm sure this has been tried already. And I'm pretty positive, that Assange has seen that coming and has made damn sure all the published material is checked and double checked and nailed down very thoroughly. Airtight, so to speak.
4) Tricking them into publishing wrong or flawed source material and then propagandizing their wrong or flawed sources and or source material. This should be not so easy. Exactly because it is an obvious attack against the credibility of the WL-project and Assange most probably is very aware of that and will, as I said before, check and double check the material. I don't know how far they just check the documents / information / data leaked on their originality and how far they check the context in which they've been produced. So one possible attack could be to produce data in a very complex situation, then leak the data and some information which is on one hand true and verifiable but on the other gives a completely wrong picture about the data and it's source. Then let them publish it with the only very limited available information of the context. And reveal later the complete context of how the data occurred changing the complete picture of the whole thing. This would definitely harm Wikileaks but I very much doubt, that it would be a deadly strike for them…
So, what's really working then?
Which leaves us with our last option: weapons that are stronger than your opponents weapons. The problem with this one is: there doesn't exist something like «less true». Either something (idea, information, happening, theorie…) is true or it is untrue. Yes, there are different perspectives but it is very rare that something is true and untrue at the same time. And knowledge, insight and truth, sought and valued by so many people on this planet is a very powerful weapon. Probably one of the most powerful if not the most powerful. The very few more powerful ones could include something like the control over planetwide powers as: the power to kill all humanity, the power to control weather planetwide or important knowledge like the forseeing of when and where natural disasters will occur or the power to save all humanity from a disease or the power to take absolute control over the whole internet for an extended time etc. But most if not all of those powers are out of the average human beings reach.
This inevitably leads us to one preferred choice: using the same weapon as Assange and Wikileaks which could look like this:
1. First we cut their potential source material down by becoming totally transparent and by not producing any more secret data. Furthermore we start to make all secret data that we accumulated so far transparent or destroy it discretely. This lowers our own profile that could be attacked or be revealed by a leaker to zero.
2. Creating a save environment for data leaks to give Wikileaks some serious competition. Thus the focus gets shifted at least a little away from Wikileaks and some of its power shifts to you.
3. Start publishing more frequently and more relevant data than Wikileaks. As the Wikileak experiment shows there is a lot of people feeling urged to come out with the truth. Wikileaks is overloaded. This is one of Wikileaks weaknesses.
4. Get hold of a widespread medium like a big television channel and or a big newspaper and start publishing your material in a way that can be understood and estimated by the public. A lot of Wikileaks' data is too complex for the average citizen. That is another weak spot of Wikileaks to exploit. Also start to not only publish single, isolated data sources but show the deeper lines and connections to your readers and followers. How things fit together. The big picture so to speak. Create a Medium which can be consumed every day in about 20 minutes but reads in a way that is more captivating than all Steven King stories together, more deep than all philosopher's knowledge accumulated, that is more relevant to each citizen than anything he/she has stumbled upon in his/her entire life. And publish that material in an for everybody easily understandable form. Yes, this is possible. Make Wikileaks look like kids stuff compared to yours. Make WL publishings look like unimportant, boring chatter aside of your stories. Make Wikileaks history.
Roger Le Marié, 20 July 2010
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