Assange and his groupies backed wrong side
Assange and his groupies backed wrong side
Jerry CarrollMarch 30 2018, 12:01am,
Edward Lucas
The Wikileaks founder persuaded his acolytes that the US was the enemy but it turned out to be Russia and Facebook
Pity the bien-pensants. Only five years ago, life was so simple. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were heroes, defending individual freedom and privacy against the depredations of overweening state power. Western intelligence agencies were the arch-villains, reckless and unaccountable snoopers. Nato was an anachronism and worries about Russia were strictly for scaremongers. Facebook was a nice way of sharing information and keeping up with your friends. Antisemitism was bad, and so was Israel.
Now everything looks more complicated. Mr Assange’s hosts at the Ecuadorean embassy in London have removed his internet access after he issued a series of tweets implicitly backing the Russian approach to the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury. Many of his fans had already lost patience, finding the Wikileaks founder divisive, duplicitous and sexist.
Mr Assange’s personal qualities aside, the self-professed whistleblowing organisation no longer looks like a bastion of integrity. Its reputation is tarnished by its role in smearing Hillary Clinton and in trying to help Donald Trump’s election campaign. Carelessness has not helped either: if you are going to leak secrets, you should do so carefully. Wikileaks has let slip personal details of people such as anti-Taliban activists in Afghanistan and crime correspondents for Russian news outlets whose only mistake was to trust western officials’ ability to keep their identities secure.
The Nato-bashing and Kremlin-loving camp used to be an almost wholly left-wing preserve. Uncomfortably for outfits such as the Trump-loathing Stop the War Coalition, their latest bedfellows are the US president’s most enthusiastic supporters. For people such as Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an admirable epitome of muscular state sovereignty, and military intervention in support of democracy and human rights is a waste of time.
Meanwhile, the liberal-minded types who regard the Trump administration with horror are engaged in a passionate if one-sided love affair with the intelligence and security services. Lefties cheer when James Clapper, the former American spy chief, denounces Mr Trump; they used to decry him for supposedly misleading Congress about the scope of the National Security Agency’s activities. In Britain the liberal left has stopped complaining about GCHQ. Instead it applauds our electronic spy agency’s diligent and comprehensive collection of material about the Kremlin’s cultivation of Mr Trump’s business empire and campaign, a picture so alarming that the agency’s director at the time, Robert Hannigan, flew to America to brief the Obama-era FBI.
It is the hawkish Republicans who think this was political overreach, and, rumour has it, insisted that Theresa May sack Mr Hannigan before her visit to the White House in January 2017. On the left, calls for tougher oversight of cops and spooks are forgotten; now the concern is that politicians may muzzle them. The same people who used to rally round Mr Snowden are now hoping that Robert Mueller’s investigation will bring down the president.
Facebook has emerged as a far bigger threat to privacy than anything the state can get up to, at least in western countries.
The huge data heist perpetrated by Mr Snowden in 2013 did not reveal a single instance of interference by western intelligence agencies in public life. GCHQ is allowed to breach our privacy only when it can prove that its activities are necessary and proportionate; it does so under a formidable mixture of political, parliamentary and judicial oversight.
The constraints on Facebook are flimsy by comparison. The worries the Snowdenistas highlighted about the — theoretical — abuse of state power seem almost irrelevant given the way big technology companies really do hoover up details about the most intimate parts of our private lives and then sell them to make money. The combination of tradable data and precise targeting makes meddling in elections, whether by the Kremlin or by plutocrats, far easier.
To be fair to Mr Assange, he has long been a critic of the technology giants. So too has Mr Snowden, now a fugitive in Moscow. But given the problems we face in 2018 they and their supporters have mostly been firing at the wrong target. A fraction of the ire, and whistleblowing zeal, that they directed against the mythical big brother of the intelligence agencies might have helped tame the real problem of greedy and reckless technology companies. A less gullible attitude to Russia might have helped stiffen spines on that front too.
The contortions of the Labour Party over antisemitism reflect the same muddle-headedness. Israel, like the intelligence agencies, is open to criticism. But an obsessive focus on its real and imagined flaws not only distracts attention from far graver problems. It is a telling sign of a skewed political agenda that drifts into bigotry.
This is prompting (I hope) a much-needed rethink, particularly on the left, about the assumptions of the post-Cold War era. Convenient, kneejerk reflexes about goodies and baddies are not just inaccurate but dangerous. Racism, it turns out, is not just a problem on the far right. If you care about feminism and gay rights, you need to be ready to confront hardline Muslims who regard them as detestable. If you dislike imperialism you should lambast Russia for its treatment of ex-colonies such as Ukraine. If you want to defend democracy, you should be a grateful ally of our security and intelligence services. And, as Mr Assange should note as he skulks in his fetid squat, we should all remember that the rule of law is still the best guarantee of individual liberty.
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