What’s freedom to Uncle Sam?

Dear old America has been very busy embarrassing itself of late. First there was the WikiLeaks expose that revealed the hypocrisies that US foreign policy so ardently relies on. Now there is the snarling, ferocious response of the US, the self-proclaimed champion of freedoms, as it slams its boot down on freedom of expression. The WikiLeaks has done far more than it had hoped to — it has left Uncle Sam in full frontal exposure.
More than anything else, the leaked cables have once again showed up the US — and the world it so diligently tries to dominate — as a rather rudimentary kingdom dominated more by Newton’s laws of physics than ethical principles or human intellect. So every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The action of exposing the US government laid WikiLeaks bare to the reaction from the mighty state.
Which came in the form of a vicious, concerted, multi-pronged attack. There was much political hate speech; an international witch-hunt for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; commands from the government to state department employees not to access (let alone download) the posted documents; warnings to college students (made public in Columbia University) that discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger their job prospects with the government; and pressures on American and multinational companies to withdraw services to the website. So credit card companies like Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations for it, as did the major Internet payment gateway PayPal, and Amazon.com threw out WikiLeaks from its computer servers.
Naturally, there would be a reaction to this as well. An outraged international cyber community rose in protest, and attacked the “enemies of WikiLeaks”. Activist hackers or “hacktivists” managed to crash or at least slow down these sites for some time, enough to lodge their protest and make the companies realise that they needed to balance their anxiety about what the government would like with what their own customers would like.
“Freedom of expression is priceless. For everything else there is Mastercard.” The hacktivists responded in Mastercard’s own advertising lingo when the company declared that it would not process donations to WikiLeaks anymore. The issue was not the leaked documents or what they revealed. It was now a matter of censorship and freedom of expression.
In this wider context, WikiLeaks has a lot of powerful supporters. Old foe Russia has chimed in with Vladimir Putin questioning America’s democratic credentials. “If it is a full-fledged democracy, then why have they put Mr Assange away in jail?” asked the Prime Minister. “If leaders start saying openly what they have long been saying behind closed doors, we can make a real breakthrough on the road to peace”, said Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. And Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva made his displeasure clear about Mr Assange’s arrest: “I don’t hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression”.
The protests are present of course, rumbling at the level of civil society’s outrage, and slowly gaining momentum as media and international leaderships wake up to the anger. Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has declared: “I am concerned about reports of pressure exerted on private companies, including banks and credit card companies, to close down credit lines for donations as well as to stop hosting the website”. Frank La Rue, United Nations representative for freedom of opinion and expression, said: “I think there is no criminal responsibility for being the medium”. Adding that “just the fact that the information is embarrassing to a government does not make it subject to be blocked or filtered”. Prosecuting Mr Assange would set a very bad example for free speech, he warned.
“What’s at stake is whether citizens of a country have a right to know what their government is doing”, said Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most respected intellectuals. He believes that government secrecy aims to protect a government from its own people. Some of the secret cables, he says, even reveal a “profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership”.
It is perhaps necessary to debate the right to freedom of expression properly in the Internet age — since for every liberal advocate of unrestricted freedom of expression there are sane, liberal souls reminding us of the limits of freedom and loud, illiberal advocates of state censorship in the name of “national security”. And the violent response to Mr Assange as a person have been disturbing. He has been arrested after he surrendered in London for interrogation on a rape charge in Sweden. Nothing to do with the leaked cables.
But politicians were more open. Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential nominee, called Mr Assange “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands”. “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” she demanded to know. Other Republicans too called Mr Assange a terrorist and some demanded the head of whoever had leaked the cables.
Comparatively, the democrats were very sober. Even Hillary Clinton, who termed the leaks as “an attack against the international community”. Now we know what the much touted “international community” actually means. Of course, her own instructions to US diplomats, as revealed by the cables, to spy on and get secret information like passwords and biometric data on UN officials (including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon) and diplomats across the globe was not an attack on “the international community”.
Ironically, Ms Clinton’s big, righteous spiel about Internet freedom last year, in response to China’s cyberattack on Google, praised “information networks” that were “helping people to discover new facts and making governments more accountable”. Clearly, she has revised her opinion since then.
Because the unthinkable has happened. The power of the Internet has been used against the US. Threatening its control over information, exposing its deceptions and hypocrisies. So the country that rushes into war with a sovereign state in the name of “freedom and democracy” is now hell bent on opposing the basic principles of both as it tramples on the right to information, the need for transparency and the importance of knowledge in a democratic society.
Take the way Mr Assange (apparently a weirdo, but that’s irrelevant) has been attacked. There is no criminal case against him for the leaks — he turned himself in on a rape charge, or some forgettable charge by two women about him and a condom during consensual sex. As far as I could make out, Mr Assange was on Interpol’s most wanted list, being tracked across the world, for not wearing condoms during consensual sex with grown women. His Swiss Bank account was frozen. And donations to his website that could help him with legal defence were disallowed.
Meanwhile, the US chatters on about democratic freedoms.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine.
She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com [2]