The world after Wikileaks

December 16, 2010 Last updated at 11: 46 GMT Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has caused protests by the Governments of the world, things will be different after Wikileaks, but not in ways that we could wait, says regular commentator Bill Thompson.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange might not be Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2010-the distinction went to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg-but certainly managed to dominate the global conversation the past few weeks.

You feel the reverberations of Wikileaks publishes many documents confidential and secret for many years and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but support for Assange is as much about your personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks or proposing to do.

To properly understand the philosophy that underpins its activities or its long-term objectives, people should read interesting analysis by Aaron Bady Assange's policy, as posted on the blog zunguzungu.

Bady uses a narrow reading of an essay by Assange status and terrorist conspiracies that Assange sees modern governance as a conspiracy than those with the power that goes against the interests and wishes of the governed and that Wikileaks exists in order to weaken the ability of Governments to communicate secretly and decrease the power of authoritarian States.

By doing this, he believes, will be opening force and lead to more progressive forms of Government-or, at least, less repressive ones.

Also, inevitably, will lead to a response from the targeted institutions and in recent weeks we have seen what happens when a State feels threatened.

Although it is neither pleasant surprise: Governments, like other complex systems, will act to preserve themselves and try to hurt or neutralize the opposition, and nothing to the United States or other Governments have done so far is exceptional.

NET conflict

In a statement made to his mother, from his prison cell, Assange said "we now know that the Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are tools of u.s. foreign policy," referring to the way in which these large companies had decided not to provide the service of Wikileaks.

But anyone who has observed the growth of the internet might have been surprised by this.

Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote about this back in 2006 in their excellent book that rules the Internet, where they stressed that the Government will always go after gatekeeper and choke points in their attempt to regulate the online activities.

In that same year, Visa and Mastercard refused to pass the funds to the .com site allofmp3 download music, even if the site has been legal in Russia, but attracted little attention because it was cheap and not music freedom of expression.

Now we face a different type of conflict, and seems to be that shape the political landscape in the years to come.

The ending of the movie Ghostbusters heroes eponymous founders are obliged to defy God Gozer, but before he looks that are said to be "choose the shape of your destructor."

Gozer, they realize, will result in any form monstrous imagine and Venkman tells others don't display anything. Unfortunately, it's too late-Ray has already thought of "but which could, something that would never hurt me"-to the point that a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man appears and proceeds to destroy New York City.

Something similar is behind the emergence of Wikileaks. Over the past two decades we have built the internet and the web and completed a process of digitization that has transformed most of the world's operational data in electronic form, from banking to love letters to diplomatic cables.

Status quo

We called away at the age of the network and still practiced in our daily lives as though nothing has really changed.

As a result we made this moment inevitable, even if it was impossible to predict the shape that would take our "destructor".

Wikileaks will inaugurate a new era of control, Bill Thompson wonders

Now it is materialized as a stateless person, formless "new media non-profit international organization that publishes observations of documents otherwise available from anonymous sources and leaks," as Wikipedia describes it.

This organisation is under threat from the outside by some of the world's most powerful States, whose action capacity is enormous. It is also challenged from within, as internal mail and documents, made available online on the website reveal the Cryptome.

But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the internet has been conclusively demonstrated, and the old order has been caused to respond.

This is the Napster of democracy, where the forms of Government that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society eager to demonstrate network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the internet could make perfect digital copies of music file compressed.

Napster was castrated by court action in the United States, but his failure inspired-to-peer services that were much more difficult to control. Sharing of music, now is unstoppable and Wikileaks and organisations that come after will ensure that the same is true of secrets.

Of course we must never underestimate the power of the State, to reinvent itself, as well as modern capitalism and constitutional monarchy seem able to do.

Wikileaks has exposed weaknesses in the way their internal flow of information control of Governments and organizations dedicated to transparency and disclosure will observe the tactics used to shut it down and adapt accordingly. But the State may learn too and have the resources to implement what you learn.

I fear that Wikileaks is likely to usher in an era of more effective control as is to sweep away the authoritarian regimes that opposes Julian Assange.

He can look at a day when the conspiratorial power state has declined, but I think we are more likely to see new forms of governance emerge that take advantage of the features of the network age to ensure that their power is intact.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service Digital Planet. Is currently working with the BBC on its draft archive.