“It is the sense of Congress,” according to the annual Intelligence Authorization Act now working its way through the US Senate,  “that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) was the lone dissenting vote on the bill, which was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee in late August. Wyden is on board with Congress’s general anti-Russia/anti-WikiLeaks hatefest, but worries that the bill’s “novel” phraseology might be “applied to journalists inquiring about secrets.” That’s a valid concern as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Simply put the US government’s problem with WikiLeaks — the basis for its claim of hostility —  is that WikiLeaks tells the truth about the US government.

WikiLeaks’s disclosures include material on US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and US spy operations against putative allies (including a scheme cooked up by the CIA and then Secretary of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to spy on United Nations officials).

“Vault 7,” the current round of WikiLeaks disclosures, reveals the tools the Central Intelligence Agency uses to compromise our computers, our telephones, even our televisions, Not to mention the tools it uses to spy on, get this, other US intelligence agencies.

 

Not that the US government is the sole target of this “non-state hostile intelligence service.” WikiLeaks embarrasses governments around the world by showing their subjects the secrets those governments (yes, including Russia’s) don’t want them to see.

Ever since passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the US government’s “defense” and “intelligence” apparatuses have accustomed themselves to growing  and operating absent any obligation or accountability to the citizens and taxpayers who pay —  in treasure, and sometimes in blood — for their games.

Bottom line: The CIA, the NSA and the other “alphabet soup” agencies of the US government spy on you, lie to you, and commit crimes in your name with presumed impunity. WikiLeaks merely shows you what they’re doing, and has yet to be caught in a lie.

When the US Senate Intelligence Committee declares WikiLeaks “hostile,” the obvious question is “hostile to whom?” WikiLeaks is allied with the American people, while the US intelligence community — and, for the moment at least, the US Senate Intelligence Committee — is our enemy.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/26/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/26/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 08/28/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as hostile does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Jacksonville, North Carolina Daily News, 08/28/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as hostile does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingston, Jamaica Observer, 08/28/17
• “WikiLeaks: hostile is as hostile does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Royal Gazette [Bermuda], 08/28/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile Is as Hostile Does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Antiwar.com, 08/28/17
• “WikiLeaks: ¿Es hostil a quién, a nosotros o a nuestros enemigos?” by Thomas L. Knapp, La Tribuna Hispana USA, 08/29/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 09/01/17
• “WikiLeaks: Hostile is as hostile does,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fayette, West Virginia Tribune, 09/06/17

“A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war,” writes Jesse Walker in the Los Angeles Times. Pundits left and right wax ominous over the prospect of a permanent break in American society along partisan Republican/Democratic lines, citing outbreaks of street fighting a la Berkeley and Charlottesville.

But, as Walker points out, “[i]f you flip quickly between small violent clashes and big political disagreements, those big disagreements will look bloodier.  But that’s an optical illusion.” The fighting at the extremes, and between wings of the mainstream political class, doesn’t reflect the gooey, ever-shifting political center where most Americans live.

Elections are centrifuges which temporarily spin that center out into two halves (with a small remainder of third party voters), after which the people involved go back to living with each other in relative peace. Which is why, as Walker writes, “a near-future war with two clear sides and Gettysburg-sized casualty counts is about as likely as a war with the moon.”

Another reason to doubt predictions of such clear-cut conflict is geography.

Even in America’s last Civil War, the lines of demarcation weren’t quite so clear as we like to see them in retrospect. The status of Missouri, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and western Virginia vis a vis Union and Confederacy were very much up in the air through much of the war.

Today, the lines are even more blurry. “Red” states abut “blue” states and “purple” is a thing too.  Purple Colorado is surrounded by a sea of red. The reliably Democratic west coast states are across the country from most of their partisan sister polities. “Live free or die” New Hampshire borders the effectively euro-socialist enclave of “Taxachusetts.” We’re too mixed up to break up.

So, if we can’t get along and we can’t separate, why not just abandon the notion of geographic state monopolies and let people choose the kinds of governance they want in situ at a more granular level?

It’s called panarchy,  defined by John Zube as “[t]he realization of as many different, autonomous and voluntary communities as are wanted by members for themselves, all coexisting non-territorially, side by side and intermingled …”

Sound complicated? It really isn’t. All any of us owes his neighbor is justice. Outside that general principle, there’s no particular reason that you, me and the person across the street all need answer to the same rulers or get our “public” services from the same providers.

Would an interlocking framework of autonomous, voluntary, non-territorial communities give rise to novel difficulties? Sure. But there’s no reason to believe those difficulties would be any worse than those we face now in our one-size-fits-all political system. And we’d be freer to find solutions.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/23/17
• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/24/17
• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 08/25/17
• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pahrump Valley, Nevada Times, 09/20/17

On July 12, a number of prominent companies joined in the “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.” Among them were GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google, and CloudFlare. All four companies issued pious statements about the dangerous possibility of Internet Service Providers cutting off access to perfectly legal content.

A little more than a month later, all four companies (and others) are themselves doing exactly what they warned us ISPs might do unless a “Net Neutrality” law forbade it: They’re cutting off access to perfectly legal content (yes,  neo-Nazi speech is legal in America).

Specifically, GoDaddy, Namecheap and Google have canceled (and in Google’s case, stolen) legitimately purchased domain names for, and Cloudflare has cut off DNS forwarding and DDOS protection services for, The Daily Stormer, a site connected with the “alt-right” and “white nationalist” groups of Charlottesville infamy.

This sudden turn of tech sector players  has a Nazi analog, too: The Night of the Long Knives, a three-day purge in 1934, intended to eliminate threats to Hitler’s power from within his own party. The victims here are the companies’ customers.

What gives, guys? A month ago, you were promoting the message that stuff like this would  end the “free and open Internet.” Why is Net Neutrality sauce good for the geese (ISPs), but not for you ganders (other providers of Internet services)?

I personally oppose Net Neutrality laws because I prefer to let the market handle things and expect other service providers to fulfill the market demand these companies are refusing services to. I likewise support the companies’ right to decide with whom they will or will not do business, although in my opinion Google went a bridge too far by actually stealing a customer’s domain name.

But wow, the hypocrisy. “Net Neutrality for thee, but not for me.”

And where does this stuff stop? Rumor has it that Cloudflare has now cut off another customer, Ghostrunner.net. That site is a seller of perfectly legal gun parts and machine tools. I’ve been unable to confirm that it’s an ideological ban rather than, say a billing matter. But if it’s the former, then Cloudflare’s war on a “free and open Internet” is already escalating.

First they came for The Daily Stormer. Is it possible that by 2020 the Internet will routinely “protect” us from “fake news” and only show us industry-approved “mainstream” political candidates?

As they like to say in the news biz, developing …

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Net of the Long Knives? Neutrality Advocates Put it in Reverse,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/22/17
• “Net of the Long Knives? Neutrality Advocates Put it in Reverse,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/22/17
• “Net of the long knives? Neutrality advocates put it in reverse,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star, 09/02/17