A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION (Special to BuzzFlash.com)

By Jonathan Franklin

An attempt by a Swiss bank to shut down Wikileaks, a website that publishes secret military and corporate documents, has backfired into a fiery debate over Internet freedom. On February 15, Bank Julius Baer won a court order in San Francisco Federal Court to have the US domain for the site shuttered, after the controversial whistleblower site published hundreds of pages of internal bank documents.

The documents, allegedly given to Wikileaks by a former bank vice president, purport to show money laundering and tax evasion by the venerable Geneva-based institution, which manages an estimated 405 billion Swiss francs (GBP 189.7 billion). Following the court victory, however, Bank Julius Baer instantly lost what may have been its most valuable asset – anonymity.

Hundreds of bloggers, online columnists and websites decried the bank's move as they launched a counterattack and lobbied in favor of Wikileaks right to anonymously publish secrets. By Wednesday evening, less than a week after the court decision, a Google search for the court case turned up a staggering 69,000 hits. Four hours later, the tally was 78,000 hits.

"The infrastructure that wikileaks uses is easily replicated. It is not unique but potentially very important as it is a format that is simple, inexpensive to design and easily mirrored. …from a technical standpoint it is trivial," said John Paulfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center at Harvard. "In a way it is a censors nightmare and a very good friend to democracy activists in repressive regimes."

While the Judge’s order has blocked the US website address, the banned documents were plastered around the world on websites from South Africa to Switzerland. Founders of Wikileaks long ago made contingency plans by setting up sites around the world including here [1] that continued to publish thousands of documents and promote what the website calls "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis."

Whether the controversy will also derail Julius Baer’s attempt to spin off Julius Baer Americas, its $73 billion US subsidiary in an IPO remains unclear. With thousands of Internet users and the worldwide media now carousing through the bank’s internal records, however, Goldman Sachs will bring a most unusual IPO to market – a secretive Swiss bank with a controversial Caymen Islands subsidiary under worldwide scrutiny.

"The bank is in a tough position. They've gotten an order out of a judge on very short notice and without Wikileaks represented; as the case matures, I think the American courts will be reluctant to maintain the broad remedy of trying to block access to an entire Web site," says Oxford's Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation. "Wikileaks is just a small example of a larger phenomenon on today's Internet - data is treated as just heaps of information, whether it's a song recording or a sensitive bank document or someone's medical records."

Wikileaks itself is amorphous. The site has no office. There is no CEO, no staff list, no organizational chart, just a skeleton advisory committee that includes Chinese dissidents, an Australian broadcaster, a Brazilian human rights activist and CJ Hinge, an American draft resister now living in Thailand. "Wikileaks is a decentralized phenomenon and that means there are wikileaks volunteers in dozens of countries. These volunteers form a very loose network so that in fact, government can't home in on anybody and take drastic action against them," said Hinge, in a telephone interview from Thailand. "Ordinary people come across things that governments or companies or individuals would prefer to keep secret. I think it is possible for almost everybody to expose these kinds of events on wikileaks."

The idea of leaking secrets over the web is hardly new. Sites like www.thesmokinggun [2]have been publishing government secrets for years, but often stuck between party picturess of drunk celebrities those documents get lost in the cleavage. John Young's one man www.cryptome.org [3] has thousands of secret government documents posted, but the format is so user unfriendly that the information is practically encrypted to the average internet user. Enter wiki – not wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopaedia which allows everyday readers to edit and post encyclopaedic information. No, this is wiki, the concept of collaborative intelligence. Much like open source software designs, the wiki concept is based on the simple premise that thousands of people working together through loose peer review and public participation can create brilliant results. Wikileaks has no official relation to the wikipedia site, though both websites share a faith in free forming networks of Internet users to produce a better world.

The first wikileak came in late 2006, as a network of Chinese dissidents and privacy activists sought to create a public advisory board. They approached Stephen Aftergood from Secrecy News who not only refused the offer but criticized the concept, saying "without accountable editorial oversight, publication can more easily become an act of aggression or an incitement to violence, not to mention an invasion of privacy or an offense against good taste." Another recruit, Young, of Cryptome, went a step further and published on his website, the private emails from wikileaks soliciting his involvement. Both incidents created a buzz online.

"The website essentially exploded," said David Zetland, who was involved in early planning of the wikileaks site in December 2007. "I looked at it one day and it was nothing and 3 months later it was packed with stuff, that was mainly due to Julian's efforts," said Zetland, founder of www.Rumor-Mill.org [4], a site that also promotes whistleblowing. "Julian is the face (of wikileaks). Every once in a while there were other people's emails ,but he is the one responsible party. Julian is it."

"Julian", is Julian Assange, an Australian activist who is widely credited with being the organizing force behind wikileaks. Assange who spent years researching the world of computer hacking helped write "Undercover", the acclaimed history of a band of hackers. In writing "Undercover," Assange was given front row access to the power of untraceable computer networks and the splash of releasing secret information. Assange harvested his knowledge of untraceable computer networks and the thrill of releasing secret information into his dream website, creating what one wikileaks press release calls "the most powerful "intelligence agency" on earth -- an intelligence agency of the people. "It will be an open source, democratic intelligence agency."

With the unanticipated leak by Young, wikileaks lept into the internet age. Before the site was even working, thousands of internet users were looking for the page and so by Spring 2007, the website was public. Wikileaks grew rapidly as activists worldwide turned to its simple system, log onto a secure server and drop documents. "I got on board because I saw the perfect opportunity to publish the block lists. We (Freedom Against Censorship Thailand) were one of the first aboard. The minute wikileaks was announced we sent them a huge trove of secret documents," said Hinke, the advisory board member who had spent years meticulously compiling lists of websites which the Thai Kingdom deemed off limits for its subjects.

"Their censorship was not that smart, pretty much anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of computing could get around it, so we provided the tools to do it," says Hinke, who noted that in Thailand he could publicly fight for censorship without fearing for his life. "There are a lot of countries in the world where wikileaks has exposed government corruption such as Kenya…as the current slaughter shows, it is not difficult to be disappeared, tortured or extra judicially murdered in Kenya right now," explained Hinke. "By decentralizing the network, whistleblowers are never exposed."

Kenya is one example of how wikileaks can affect public policy. On August 31, 2007 , an article in The Guardian cited wikileaks in a front page story that outlined massive corruption evidence against former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi. The 110-page document prepared by Kroll Associates detailed an estimated US $2 billion in shell companies, offshore investments and properties run by members of the Moi administration and its allies. The report destroyed the anti-corruption platform of Kenyan President Kibaki and helped shift support to opposition candidate Raila Odinga.

"In countries where the institutions of power are so entrenched and the media relatively weak, this is a tremendous leveller of the playing field," said David Ardia, Director, Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard law school. "These sites can play a critical role just as major newspapers in prior decades have in showing abuses of power." Ardia, who confidently predicted that the current court stipulations against wikileaks will be overturned, expects that wikileaks-type sites will proliferate in the future. "There has been a democratization of the power to publish and users can go to wikileaks and make their own decision."

While wikileaks founders designed the system to counter the power of states censors and authoritarian regimes, the website has been hugely succesful at breaking news in Western democracies. In November 2007, wikileaks made a huge media splash in the US with the publication of the 238-page manual for the US Army´s prison at Guantanamo Bay. Entitled, "Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta" the document is still the most comprehensive guide to day-to-day operations at the controversial prison. The Guantanamo document, including detailed descriptions of everything from transfering prisoners to evading protocols of the Geneva Convention was cited by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Following the Guantanamo revelations, wikileaks continued to publish sensitive government documents, ranging from lists of military equipment in Afghanistan to procedures for chasing insurgents from Iraq into Iran. Earlier this week, wikileaks posted a Homeland Security guide to the sensitive missile shootdown by the US Navy. "It used to be a lot easier to deal with whistleblowers you could fire them, attack them and leave them defenseless," said Greg Mitchell, the top editor at US magazine Editor & Publisher. "Now the stuff goes up on the web and when you try and take it down it doesn't go down."

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Jonathan Franklin also writes for the Guardian (UK) [5]and GQ. He can be reached at chilefranklin2000@yahoo.com [6].

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