So who gets to keep secrets in America?

 

A lot of government officials seem to think the old 1963 Crystals' song perfectly describes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good
He's a rebel 'cause he never ever does what he should

Whatever Assange's faults are, he certainly is the darling of the 24-hour news cycle. We've never had such a cyber bad boy to talk about. The question for us all to address, however, is does this rebel have a legitimate cause? Or is he just being disruptive because he can.

Julian Assange's attraction to disruption is certainly understandable. This is not a guy raised among the Cleavers or the Waltons or anything approaching a stable, nuclear family. And it is what we feel in childhood that feels comfortable to us as adults.

I lifted these "fast facts" from Time Magazine's "2-minute bio"  of the founder of WikiLeaks.

Bad Boy?

•Assange was reportedly born in 1971 in the city of Townsville, northeastern Australia. He was mostly homeschooled as a child, thanks in large part to his already peripatetic existence: by the time he was 14, he and his mother had reportedly moved 37 times.

•After his mother's relationship with a musician turned violent, Assange lived on the run between the ages of 11 and 16.

•When Assange turned 16, he began hacking computers, reportedly assuming the name Mendax — from the Latin splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful."

•In 1991, at the age of 20, Assange and some fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian telecom company. He was caught and pleaded guilty to 25 charges; six other charges were dropped. Citing Assange's "intelligent inquisitiveness," the judge sentenced him only to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

•Assange studied math and physics at the University of Melbourne, though he dropped out when he became convinced that work by others in the department was being applied by defense contractors and militaries.

•In 2006, Assange decided to found WikiLeaks in the belief that the free exchange of information would put an end to illegitimate governance. The website publishes material from sources, and houses its main server in Sweden, which has strong laws protecting whistle-blowers. Assange and others at WikiLeaks also occasionally hack into secure systems to find documents to expose. In December 2006, the website published its first document: a decision by the Somali Islamic Courts Union that called for the execution of government officials. WikiLeaks published a disclaimer that the document may not be authentic but "a clever smear by U.S. intelligence."

Okay, so Julian Assange had an unstable introduction to life. But does that give him the right to try his highly-intelligent damnedest to destabilize the world for the rest of us?

David Brooks, writing yesterday in The New York Times thinks it does not.

. . . Some people argue that this diplomatic conversation is based on mechanical calculations about national self-interest, and it won’t be affected by public exposure. But this conversation, like all conversations, is built on relationships. The quality of the conversation is determined by the level of trust. Its direction is influenced by persuasion and by feelings about friends and enemies.

The quality of the conversation is damaged by exposure, just as our relationships with our neighbors would be damaged if every private assessment were brought to the light of day. We’ve seen what happens when conversations deteriorate (look at the U.S. Congress), and it’s ugly . . .

Tacoma's News Tribune also breaks very bad on Assange, beginning an editorial today by stating that

Julian Assange, the chief of WikiLeaks, is a pirate willing to endanger people’s lives with mass releases of secret U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic documents.

The U.S. government is also Officially Alarmed. The Washington Post reports today that Julian Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act.

Okay, so the establishment press and the establishment, itself, are pretty much freaked out about WikiLeaks. But I'm not as sure that the rest of us are.

Listening with half an ear (I do have work to do, you know) to On Point and Talk of the Nation yesterday, I heard many people rejoicing (is that too strong a descriptive?) that the ragged underbelly of high-level diplomacy was now slightly more visible.

I was talking about all this with Charlie this morning and he casually made an interesting, and I think germane, point. "There would be a lot less hoopla about this," my husband said, "if the government had not made everything it does secret, while actively rooting about in the personal business of American citizens."

Of course, saying the government has made everything secret except our business is at least a slight exaggeration, but I do think Charlie makes a valid point. There's a certain nah-nah-nah quality about WikiLeaks that appeals.

But is that enough to make Julian Assange a rebel with a justifiable cause?

Your thoughts, please?

What's really going on out there????

David Brooks' column yesterday in The New York Times riffed on a new study just published by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro (both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) that measured ideological segregation on the Internet. Brooks called his column "Riders on the Storm," I assume co-opting the title of a 1971 Doors song that begins . . .

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown

I guess the meaning of Mr. Brooks' title to be that, as far as life out there on the information highway goes, we're all just -- duh -- riders on the storm.

Mr. Brooks began yesterday's column by referring to a 2001 essay by Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar who now administers the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein's essay echoed concerns he'd voiced in his 2001 book, Republic.com; which makes, as Publishers Weekly puts it, "the counter-intuitive claim that the Internet causes us to become more extremist and close-minded, rather than exposing us to a haphazardly unbiased array of unexpected viewpoints."

In his column, David Brooks had this to say about Mr. Sunstein's essay (and of  his writings in general):

[Cass] Sunstein was particularly concerned about this because he has done very important work over the years about our cognitive biases. We like hearing evidence that confirms our suppositions. We filter out evidence that challenges them. . . .

. . .Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate. Those fears were supported by some other studies, and they certainly matched my own experience. Every day I seem to meet people who live in partisan ghettos, ignorant about the other side.

The Gentzkow-Shapiro study seems to show that use of the Internet is not the path most traveled to the information ghetto. As Mr.Brooks put it,

. . . People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.

It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they’re not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. . .

That sounds so optimistic, don't you think?

Lachlan Markay, writer for NewsBusters, an online site that exists to expose alleged liberal media bias also wrote about the Gentzkow-Shapirostudy yesterday.

One of the gripes about online journalism often aired by the Helen Thomases and the Chuck Todds of the world is that online news consumers will only consume news that reinforces their worldview or political beliefs. A new scholarly study challenges that assumption . . .

The study found that the Internet exposes people to ideas that they do not normally encounter in face-to-face interactions during their daily lives. Though this should come as little surprise -- with the wealth of information the web provides, how could it not regularly challenge worldviews and preconceptions? -- it is perhaps worth reminding the skeptics.

Also optimistic, right?

But what the Gentzkow-Shapirostudy study doesn't address is why we, the polarized American electorate, visit the sites we visit. And how we behave while we are on them. And whether we ever actually consider the arguments made on these sights.

Sadly, it seems to me, if the comments we leave are any indication, we are not visiting sites with which we have ideological differences in order to engage in information gathering and civil discourse.

For example, this morning I clicked on the first article I could find on the front page of The Washington Post that had "Obama" in its headline. It was about nominating our next Supreme Court justice.

I then read the comments, which were largely rude and illogical. It made me wonder if a lot of people posting responses had even read the articles.

I wondered the same when I scanned the comments attached to a similar article posted on Fox News.

So, I'd like to ask Drs. Gentzkow and Shapiro, Mr. Brooks and Mr Markay, what good they think comes of all the time folks are spending on-line, riding around in the information storm.

Maybe Mr. Sunstein is right to worry.

In appreciation of other people's words . . .

This post is about two people's words; one a WMRA community member; the other a columnist for The New York Times.

As the Times part of the post is short, I'll start with that. In the interest of continuing a nuanced reflection on President Obama's West Point Speech, I enthusiastically recommend today's column by conservative David Brooks.

It made me think, rather than just react emotionally, to the current situation in Afghanistan.

It ends this way:

The advantage of the Obama governing style is that his argument-based organization is a learning organization. Amid the torrent of memos and evidence and dispute, the Obama administration is able to adjust and respond more quickly than, say, the Bush administration ever did.

The disadvantage is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers and Marines don’t have the luxury of adopting President Obama’s calibrated stance since they are being asked to potentially sacrifice everything.

Barring a scientific breakthrough, we can’t merge Obama’s analysis with George Bush’s passion. But we should still be glad that he is governing the way he is. I loved covering the Obama campaign. But amid problems like Afghanistan and health care, it simply wouldn’t do to give gauzy speeches about the meaning of the word hope. It is in Obama’s nature to lead a government by symposium. Embrace the complexity. Learn to live with the dispassion.

WMRA community member Eva Robertson is the second person whose words I wish to appreciate. First of all, Eva's had experiences most of us haven't. Before she moved to Harrisonburg, she'd danced in American Ballet Theatre in New York City, under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov, and worked as a lawyer with the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.

This experiential combination of the creative and the analytical is present, I think, in her writing as well.

I met Eva when she joined the first ever WMRA essay writing workshop. I get the feeling Eva thinks about herself as a beginning writer, because she's only been writing seriously and in public for a couple of years. I, however, do not consider her a beginning writer. In my opinion she puts words down on the page that are well worth reading, that are about subjects well worth pondering.

And in today's case, worth listening to as well, for Eva is the author/voicer of today's "WMRA Civic Soapbox" (links to audio and text). In it she gives us her thoughts on a woman's right to choose and the Stupak amendment. Whether it makes you go yeah! or yuck! I think you'll appreciate the writing for its combination of close reasoning and good writing.

Eva's "Soapbox" is  an essay that didn't start out as an essay, but as a blog post. Eva writes The Dogwood Diarist, a blog on which she posts her thoughts a couple of times a week, writing about whatever strikes her. Her posts are sometimes about politics, sometimes about people she knows, sometimes about her personal life. And, in my opinion, no matter what Eva's subject is, the writing is makes her thoughts worth reading.

Good writing, to me, is one of life's great enhancements. I always have access to my my own thoughts; what I crave is access to other people's, at least when those thoughts are well-considered and well-expressed.  I'm sure most of you already know and read David Brooks. But I figured not all that many of you may know and read The Dogwood Diarist, so I thought I should let you know about it.

One other thing: Every time I insert a link into this blog that takes you instantly to another person's writing that I think you might find worth reading, I give a silent hooray! for the internet. I do celebrate the access it gives us all to other people's words.

"Obama's West Point Speech"

That's what PBS News Hour host Jim Lehrer said history will call last night's presidential address. He was talking, post-speech, with his regular dueling pundits, liberal Mark Shields and conservative David Brooks, two people whose usually diverse reactions and opinions I value highly.

Both men are quick-witted, terribly smart, informed, thoughtful, non-reactive, take history more seriously then themselves, and both have fines senses of humor. And yet last night, both Mr. Shields and Mr. Brooks, usually fast on their verbal feet, seemed to me to want time to ponder what our President had said before they offered their full analysis of it.

So did I.

Afghanistan is Afghanistan is Afghanistan; history's savagely recurring problem.

This morning I saw in the NY Times that Republicans had reacted with cautious support to Obama's address while Democrats remained skeptical. The Times editorial asked how are we going to pay for what we are about to do.

One thing I did react purely positively to was Obama's closing line in which he channeled Abraham Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union address--made before Lincoln was even his party's presidential nominee. Lincoln, talking about slavery, said:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

 President Obama ended last night's speech  this way:

America - we are passing through a time of great trial. And the message that we send in the midst of these storms must be clear: that our cause is just, our resolve unwavering. We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might, and with the commitment to forge an America that is safer, a world that is more secure, and a future that represents not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes.

I did note President Obama's concise, vivid, clear use of the English language; his complete refusal to rah! rah! war; his lack of need to reduce this deplorable situation to good guys vs. bad guys.

This morning, I'm still figuring out my own reaction to the speech. What about you? Did you listen/watch/read the speech. If so, I do especially today invite you to post your reaction to last night's speech or to e-mail me if that's easier and I'll do the posting.