« Se protéger seul dans son coin, c'est comme recycler trois déchets pour sauver la planète » Jacob Appelbaum, 30 ans, américain.
Quelle contre-offensive serait efficace ?
La seule solution est de multiplier les fuites de documents secrets. Le monde a besoin de plus d'hommes courageux comme Edward Snowden, qui risquent leur vie pour imposer la transparence. Il est facile aujourd'hui pour un jeune bien formé techniquement d'infiltrer ces agences, car elles ont sans cesse besoin de nouveaux talents. Nous devons aussi changer la tonalité du discours ambiant. Tout le monde parle de « cyberguerre » comme si elle était inéluctable. Il faudrait arrêter un peu, et parler plutôt de « cyberpaix ». Notre rôle est de pacifier Internet.
« Si nous perdons la liberté d'avoir une vie privée, nous perdrons toutes les autres » Jérémie Zimmermann, 35 ans, français.
There have always been leaks, of course, and there would no doubt continue to be leaks even if WikiLeaks didn’t exist. The legendary Watergate investigation and the release of the famous Pentagon Papers both happened without WikiLeaks, or even the internet. But there’s also no question that having a repository for such documents that is both anonymous (or as close as it is possible to get) and largely stateless would make it easier for such leaks to occur.
Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defence Department official who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — and later became part of one of the most ground-breaking First Amendment trials in history — has said that Manning and WikiLeaks are carrying on the same tradition he was a part of: namely, the quest to hold the government accountable for its actions. Since the media seem reluctant to play the role they should in this effort, Ellsberg says, WikiLeaks becomes even more necessary.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks itself is struggling — in part because of Assange’s legal issues, as well as a lack of funding that was exacerbated when PayPal, Visa and MasterCard cut off the ability to donate to the organization, despite the fact that WikiLeaks hasn’t been accused of a crime. And viable alternatives have not yet emerged (a splinter group headed by a former WikiLeaks lieutenant tried to set up a competitor called OpenLeaks without much success, and the New Yorker recently launched its own effort called StrongBox).
There's much more we don't know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA's ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS's plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA's Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we're completely in the dark.
And that's wrong.
The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge. It overclassifies more information than ever. And we learn, again and again, that our government regularly classifies things not because they need to be secret, but because their release would be embarrassing.
Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state.
We need whistle-blowers.
Leaking information without getting caught is difficult. It's almost impossible to maintain privacy in the Internet Age. The WikiLeaks platform seems to have been secure -- Bradley Manning was caught not because of a technological flaw, but because someone he trusted betrayed him -- but the U.S. government seems to have successfully destroyed it as a platform. None of the spin-offs have risen to become viable yet. The New Yorker recently unveiled its Strongbox platform for leaking material, which is still new but looks good. This link contains the best advice on how to leak information to the press via phone, email, or the post office. The National Whistleblowers Center has a page on national-security whistle-blowers and their rights.