(AP Photo/File)

When Aaron Swartz committed suicide at the age of 26 in January, the online world was stunned. He had been the golden boy of the Internet—a leader in the advocacy of online rights who had also made major programming contributions to some of the most important platforms on the Web. 

Why did he kill himself? His friends and family are convinced it was because unrelenting federal prosecutors indicted him on thirteen felony counts, threatening to put him away for up to ninety-five years. There is certainly no disputing that Swartz found himself on the wrong side of prosecutors who were going to do everything in their power to incarcerate him, even though it is now clear that he committed no crime. But apart from the tragedy of his death, the worst thing is that his case is just the tip of a growing iceberg.

In the year since Swartz’s death, a number of other computer hacktivists and whistleblowers have become the targets of the wrath of prosecutors and judges, and they have either gone to jail or are facing decades in prison—in one case 105 years. In each instance, the general theme seems to be the same: these are people who were interested in freeing up knowledge for the social good. In Swartz’s case, the goal was to liberate publicly funded knowledge that had been captured and placed behind a paywall. In other cases, it was to gain and disseminate knowledge about the nefarious dealings between our government and unaccountable private intelligence contractors. And in still other cases, it was to expose the ways corporations and private intelligence firms run psychological operations against Americans.

Taken together, the lesson appears to be that computer hacking for social causes and computer hacking aimed at exposing the secrets of governing elites will not be tolerated. The state will come down on such people as hard as it can. “The same beast bit us both,” jailed hacktivist Jeremy Hammond told The Guardian, referring to himself and Swartz. In both cases, as in many others, the question is why?

The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was based on the premise that he had obtained unauthorized access to the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloaded millions of pages of academic journal articles from JSTOR, an online library. According to prosecutors, this act amounted to a violation of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a felony to use a computer network in an unauthorized manner.

The CFAA was inspired in part by Hollywood fantasy: after political leaders watched the Matthew Broderick movie WarGames, they became concerned that a computer hacker might hack into NORAD via a dial-up modem. (Representative Victor Fazio reported that Ronald Reagan thought the movie was nonfiction.) The law is antiquated to say the least, and it is fair to say that prosecutors use—and abuse—it in ways not intended when it was written in the era before the Internet. For example, the Justice Department has held that a person can violate the CFAA simply by breaching the terms of service on an online user agreement (i.e., by lying in your user profile on Match.com). The result is that just about everyone, at some point, has violated the CFAA, making it an ideal tool for overzealous prosecutors.

Swartz’s actions were undoubtedly intended to make a statement: academic research paid for by the public should not be kept behind a paywall. In Swartz’s view, the system amounted to “the private theft of public culture.” Indeed, it is arguable that the current system of distribution of academic research amounts to an extortion racket in which private companies seize control of publicly funded research and hold it hostage for money. Swartz found this deeply immoral; his way of protesting was to download pages of academic publications via MIT’s computer network.

But did this act of civil disobedience actually break any laws? This past summer, MIT answered the question when it released an internal report on Swartz’s actions and his subsequent prosecution. The report was stunning for several reasons, but one in particular stood out: MIT found no reason to think that Swartz engaged in an unauthorized access of MIT’s computer network; the entire premise of the prosecution was false. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and close friend of Swartz, summed up the matter as follows:

The report says that MIT never told the prosecutor that Aaron’s access was “unauthorized.”… The whole predicate to the government’s case was that Aaron’s access to the network was “unauthorized,” yet apparently in the many many months during which the government was prosecuting, they were too busy to determine whether, indeed, access to the network was “authorized.”

Furthermore, MIT’s review panel reported that the prosecutor never even asked if Swartz had violated the MIT access rules, adding, “The Review Panel wonders why.”

Not only did prosecutors file unfounded charges that carried the threat of nearly a century in prison; the MIT report also revealed that prosecutors turned up the heat on Swartz once he showed the audacity to try to defend himself in public. According to Lessig, “The prosecutor said that the straw that broke the camel’s back was that when he indicted the case, and allowed Swartz to come to the courthouse as opposed to being arrested, Swartz used the time to post a ‘wild Internet campaign’ in an effort to drum up support.” By “wild Internet campaign,” the prosecutor apparently was referring to an online petition by Demand Progress, conducted in support of Swartz.

In other words, the prosecution acted in a retaliatory manner because Swartz had dared to exercise his First Amendment rights. But when can it be more important to exercise your First Amendment rights than when you or a friend is being falsely accused of a crime? And what theory of justice says it is appropriate for a prosecutor to retaliate against someone for exercising that constitutional right?

By the end, Swartz was financially and emotionally exhausted. He could not bring himself to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, but he also could not afford to fight on. Others might have taken a plea, as so many defendants do. After all, 95 percent of felony prosecutions result in plea bargains. Despite our ideals about a fair trial by jury, going to court and defending oneself is just not economically feasible for most except the very richest Americans.

* * *

On November 15, a 28-year-old Chicago hacker named Jeremy Hammond also learned just how impossible it is to defend oneself in today’s hacktivist-hunting climate. Hammond hacked a private intelligence company named Stratfor and released millions of e-mails detailing its role in spying on American citizens and engaging in psychological operations (psyops) against activist groups that were, for example, protesting environmental damage. The e-mails detailed the ways Stratfor’s agents would identify the personality types of the members of activist groups and then “neutralize” them based on those personality types (the playbook: isolate the “radicals,” cultivate the “idealists,” educate them into becoming “realists” and then co-opt the realists).

When Hammond pleaded guilty to the Stratfor hack, he noted that even if he could defend himself against the charges on grounds of civil disobedience, the federal prosecutors had threatened that he would face the same charges in eight different districts and he would be shipped to each of them in succession. He would become a defendant for life. With no financial resources to fight on, Hammond had no choice but to accept a deal by which he would be sentenced to ten years in prison. But as he made the plea, he issued a statement saying, “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.”

The key element in Hammond’s statement is his concern about finding out what was going on “behind closed doors,” because this, not the hack itself, is arguably the reason the government came down on him so hard. We lionize people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who began their careers as hackers. (Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their start making and selling “blue boxes”—devices whose sole purpose was defrauding the phone company.) And the government itself hires hackers—recruits them—to probe its various systems for weaknesses, protect them from cyber attacks and, yes, perform hacks. As Hammond told the court at his sentencing, the same FBI informant who helped unmask him also directed him to break into the websites of several foreign governments, including those of Iran, Brazil and Turkey.

One gets the impression, then, that Hammond incurred the government’s full prosecutorial wrath not because he hacked, but because of whom and for whom he hacked. His “mistake” was to hack for the people and in particular to hack his way into the shadowy world of private surveillance companies and expose the ways popular movements are spied on and undermined.

This is supported by the case of Barrett Brown, a journalist who established a journalistic project (Project PM) that crowd-sourced the analysis of the Stratfor and other hacks. Brown did not hack anything; he copied a link to the e-mails that Hammond uploaded to the Internet and brought the link to the attention of the editorial board of Project PM. Today, Brown sits in federal custody, facing 105 years in prison. He has been denied bail. The pretext for most of the charges that led to his incarceration is that because there were unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes in the Stratfor e-mails, when he shared that link with Project PM he was guilty of trafficking in stolen authentication features, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

But, of course, what the FBI was more likely interested in was Project PM and what it had learned about Stratfor and other private intelligence firms. In March, the Justice Department served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the Project PM website, and asked in particular for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to Project PM.

Just as prosecutors had retaliated against Swartz for trying to defend himself on the Internet, prosecutors moved to prevent Brown and his legal team from doing the same. On June 18, I published an article on TheNation.com called “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown.” After it came out, I was interviewed about Brown on Democracy Now! Based on the article, the TV appearance and a handful of similar media mentions of Brown, the prosecution cobbled together a false story claiming that defense attorneys for Brown were orchestrating a PR campaign on his behalf. Prosecutors sought a gag order on Brown and his defense team; now neither he nor his lawyers are allowed to discuss his case in the media. 

What could be the justification for this? Prosecutors claimed that the media mentions were making it impossible to empanel a neutral jury in north Texas. But it seems more likely that the prosecution was concerned that media attention would shed more light on the secrets divulged by Project PM as well as the prosecution’s own malfeasance in the matter. 

In Brown’s case as in others, prosecutors drew on existing laws and then stretched, warped and mutilated the interpretation of those laws beyond their obvious intent. Laws against credit card fraud were stretched to include sharing a hyperlink to a public database. Likewise, in Swartz’s case, the prosecutors relied on the CFAA and warped it to mean any unauthorized use of a computer system, even when the supposed victim does not consider the use unauthorized. (There is a move in Congress to pass Aaron’s Law, an attempt to reform the CFAA, but clearly this is only part of the problem. Prosecutors will take any law—the CFAA or credit card fraud law or, in the case of Chelsea Manning, the 1917 Espionage Act—and warp it as needed to prosecute their targets.)

The CFAA was also used to prosecute Andrew Auernheimer, who is serving forty-one months in prison. Auernheimer’s case is less well-known than those of Swartz, Hammond and Brown, but they share certain characteristics. Auernheimer and an associate harvested the e-mail addresses of early iPad users from public web pages maintained by AT&T. They did this by building a little web crawler that could go through URLs numerically and extract the data. In other words, they did what Google web crawlers do every second of every day. Auernheimer then gave the results to the website Gawker to illustrate that AT&T was not properly protecting the security of its customers. He might have expected a thank-you note from AT&T, but federal prosecutors decided that instead he should be tried for violating the CFAA. Even though the information was publicly available on the Internet, its availability was a surprise and an embarrassment to AT&T, and hence, according to prosecutors, the access must have been unauthorized.

* * *

Why should we care about the cases of Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown and Andrew Auernheimer? Apart from the great injustices done to them, there is the problem that when laws are overextended for cases like these, a precedent is established that can be used to incarcerate any of us.

In a world where everyone is potentially a felon in the eyes of the law, who will go to prison? In the cases of Swartz, Hammond, Brown and Auernheimer, it appears that they became targets because they allowed us to peer behind the veil of power to see how it is maintained by psyops, disinformation, and the illusion of care and competence. And what better way to quash future attempts than high-profile prosecutions? As Hammond has said, “They have made it clear they are trying to send a message to others who come after me.”

The crackdown on hacktivists is therefore not merely part of a war on dissent. It is part of a war on knowledge, which goes beyond hackers to include whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Manning and Thomas Drake. They incurred the wrath of the state because they insisted on telling the truth, and all of them have suffered and/or been forced into exile, as have some journalists who reported their leaks and discoveries.

Aaron Swartz’s last project was called Strong Box. It was an application, made for The New Yorker, to allow whistleblowers to anonymously and securely submit documents to reporters. Had he not died, he may well have gone on to develop similar applications for other journalistic projects, including WikiLeaks.

Yet Strong Box lives on, and while Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown sit in jail, others have begun where they left off, investigating the private intelligence business. The government may be winning individual battles, but perhaps, thanks to the efforts of Swartz, Hammond, Brown and others, the advocates of transparency and knowledge will yet prevail.

The Justice Department has been ruthless in targeting those who bring hidden information into the public realm, writes Chase Madar, in “Government Persecution, From Aaron Swartz to Bradley Manning.”

Barrett Brown. (Photo courtesy of Barrett Brown’s YouTube channel.)
 
In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a defense of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on February 10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”

By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”

But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutiae (and ability to organize and explain minutiae) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist collective. (In fact, he only had screen names of a few members). Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report, the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company e-mails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM, and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.

One connection was between Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks had claimed to possess a large cache of documents belonging to Bank of America. Concerned about this, Bank of America approached the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ directed it to the law and lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which does legal work for Wells Fargo and General Dynamics and also lobbies for Koch Industries, Americans for Affordable Climate Policy, Gas Processors Association, Entergy among many other firms. The DoJ recommended that Bank of America hire Hunton and Williams, explicitly suggesting Richard Wyatt as the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the lead attorney in the Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the Yes Men.

In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and, according to Brown, a secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team Themis”—‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber Watch, using such tactics as creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.” In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.” The leaked e-mails showed that similar disinformation campaigns were being planned against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.

It was clear to Brown that these were actions of questionable legality, but beyond that, government contractors were attempting to undermine Americans’ free speech—with the apparent blessing of the DOJ. A group of Democratic congressmen asked for an investigation into this arrangement, to no avail.

By June 2011, the plot had thickened further. The FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who went under the nom de guerre Sabu. The FBI arrested him on June 7, 2011, and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Just three days before his arrest, Sabu had been central to the formation of a new group called AntiSec, which comprised his former LulzSec crew members, as well as members as Anonymous. In early December AntiSec hacked the website of a private security company called Stratfor Global Intelligence. On Christmas Eve, it released a trove of some 5 million internal company e-mails. AntiSec member and Chicago activist Jeremy Hammond has pled guilty to the attack and is currently facing ten years in prison for it.

The contents of the Stratfor leak were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. They included discussion of opportunities for renditions and assassinations. For example, in one video, Statfor’s vice president of intelligence, Fred Burton, suggested taking advantage of the chaos in Libya to render Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who had been released from prison on compassionate grounds due to his terminal illness. Burton said that the case “was personal.” When someone pointed out in an e-mail that such a move would almost certainly be illegal—“This man has already been tried, found guilty, sentenced…and served time”—another Stratfor employee responded that this was just an argument for a more efficient solution: “One more reason to just bugzap him with a hellfire. :-)”

(Stratfor employees also seemed to take a keen interest in Jeremy Scahill’s writings about Blackwater in The Nation, copying and circulating entire articles, with comments suggesting a principle interest was in the question of whether Blackwater was setting up a competing intelligence operation. E-mails also showed grudging respect for Scahill: “Like or dislike Scahill’s position (or what comes of his work), he does an amazing job outing [Blackwater].”)

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems, an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked e-mail read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

The FBI acquired a warrant for Brown’s laptop, gaining the authority to seize any information related to HBGary, Endgame Systems, Anonymous and, most ominously, “email, email contacts, ‘chat’, instant messaging logs, photographs, and correspondence.” In other words, the FBI wanted his sources.

When the FBI went to serve Brown, he was at his mother’s house. Agents returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieving his laptop. To turn up the heat on Brown, the FBI initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice for concealing his laptop computer in her house. (Facing criminal charges, on March 22, 2013, his mother, Karen McCutchin, pled guilty to one count of obstructing the execution of a search warrant. She faces up to twelve months in jail. Brown maintains that she did not know the laptop was in her home.)

By his own admission, the FBI’s targeting of his mother made Brown snap. In September 2012, he uploaded an incoherent YouTube video, in which he explained that he had been in treatment for an addiction to heroin, taking the medication Suboxone, but had gone off his meds and now was in withdrawal. He threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother, by name, warning:

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me.… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”

“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids…. How do you like them apples?”

The media narrative was immediately derailed. No longer would this be a story about the secretive information-military-industrial complex; now it was the sordid tale of a crazy drug addict threatening an FBI agent and his (grown) children. Actual death threats against agents are often punishable by a few years in jail. But Brown’s actions made it easier for the FBI to sell some other pretext to put him away for life.

The Stratfor data included a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. On this basis, the DOJ accused Brown of credit card fraud for having shared that link with the editorial board of ProjectPM. Specifically, the FBI charged him with traffic in stolen authentication features, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as an obstruction of justice charge (for being at his mother’s when the initial warrant was served) and charges stemming from his threats against the FBI agent. All told, Brown is looking at century of jail time: 105 years in federal prison if served sequentially. He has been denied bail.

Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of ten years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself but with Brown’s journalism. As Glenn Greenwald remarked inThe Guardian: “It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.”

Today, Brown is in prison and ProjectPM is under increased scrutiny by the DOJ, even as its work has ground to a halt. In March, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, describing it as a “forum” through which Brown and others would “engage in, encourage, or facilitate the commission of criminal conduct online.” The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this relationship has become. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is also using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens like Barrett Brown who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships. In order to neutralize those who question or investigate the system, laws are being reinterpreted or extended or otherwise misappropriated in ways that are laughable—or would be if the consequences weren’t so dire.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying programs, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing to a much deeper problem. It isn’t the sort of problem that can be fixed by trying to tweak a few laws or by removing a few prosecutors. The problem is not with bad laws or bad prosecutors. What the case of Barrett Brown has exposed is that we confronting a different problem altogether. It is a systemic problem. It is the failure of the rule of law.

Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, died in a car crash yesterday. Read Greg Mitchell’s obituary here.

In recent months there has been considerable discussion about the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and understandably so, given the volume and sensitivity of the documents the website has released. What this discussion has revealed, however, is that the media and government agencies believe there is a single protagonist to be concerned with—something of a James Bond villain, if you will—when in fact the protagonist is something altogether different: an informal network of revolutionary individuals bound by a shared ethic and culture.

According to conventional wisdom, the alleged protagonist is, of course, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the discussion of him has ranged from Raffi Khatchadourian’s June portrait in The New Yorker, which makes Assange sound like a master spy in a John le Carré novel, to Tunku Varadarajan’s epic ad hominem bloviation in The Daily Beast: "With his bloodless, sallow face, his lank hair drained of all color, his languorous, very un-Australian limbs, and his aura of blinding pallor that appears to admit no nuance, Assange looks every inch the amoral, uber-nerd villain."

Some have called for putting Assange "out of business" (even if we must violate international law to do it), while others, ranging from Daniel Ellsberg to Assange himself, think he is (in Ellsberg’s words) "in some danger." I don’t doubt that Assange is in danger, but even if he is put out of business by arrest, assassination or character impeachment with charges of sexual misconduct, it would not stanch the flow of secret documents into the public domain. To think otherwise is an error that reflects a colossal misunderstanding of the nature of WikiLeaks and the subculture from which it emerged.

WikiLeaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius; it is the product of decades of collaborative work by people engaged in applying computer hacking to political causes, in particular, to the principle that information-hoarding is evil—and, as Stewart Brand said in 1984, "Information wants to be free." Today there is a broad spectrum of people engaged in this cause, so that were Assange to be eliminated today, WikiLeaks would doubtless continue, and even if WikiLeaks were somehow to be eliminated, new sites would emerge to replace it.

Let’s begin by considering whether it is possible to take WikiLeaks offline, as called for in the Washington Post by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who added that "taking [Assange] off the streets is not enough; we must also recover the documents he unlawfully possesses and disable the system he has built to illegally disseminate classified information."

Consider the demand that we "recover the documents." Even the documents that have not been made public by WikiLeaks are widely distributed all over the Internet. WikiLeaks has released an encrypted 1.4 gigabyte file called "insurance.aes256." If something happens to Assange, the password to the encrypted file will be released (presumably via a single Twitter tweet). What’s in the file? We don’t know, but at 1.4 gigabytes, it is nineteen times the size of the Afghan war log that was recently distributed to major newspapers. Legendary hacker Kevin Poulsen speculates that the file "is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already."

It’s also a bit difficult to "disable the system," since WikiLeaks did not need to create a new network; the group simply relied on existing electronic communications networks (e.g., the Internet) and the fact that there are tens of thousands of like-minded people all over the world. Where did all those like-minded people come from? Are they all under the spell of Assange? To the contrary, they were active long before Assange sat down to hack his first computer.

It has long been an ethical principle of hackers that ideas and information are not to be hoarded but are to be shared.In 1984, when Assange turned 13, Steven Levy described this attitude in his book Hackers. After interviewing a number of hackers, he distilled a "hacker ethic," which included, among others, the following two maxims: (1) all information should be free; (2) mistrust authority and promote decentralization.

These sentiments were poetically expressed by a hacker named The Mentor, in an essay titled "The Conscience of a Hacker." It was written shortly after his arrest, and appeared in the important hacker publication Phrack in 1986.

We explore…and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge…and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias…and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all.

Indeed, you can’t stop them all. One year after The Mentor’s manifesto was published, Assange acquired a modem and entered cyberspace for the first time. In the quarter-century since, that basic hacker philosophy has not been abandoned, and indeed has evolved into a broad cultural movement. Hacker conferences with thousands of attendees have sprung up in places ranging from Amsterdam and New York to Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi, and small weekly hacker meetups are routine in every major city in the world.

For many hackers, this activity has taken a decidedly political turn—into what is sometimes called hacktivism. Hacktivism is the application of information technologies (and the hacking of them) to political action. This has ranged from simple website defacings and attempts to unbottle secret information to efforts to ensure the privacy of ordinary citizens by providing them military-grade encryption (a successful mission of the infamous Cypherpunks).

Hacktivism has been extended to political action against all manner of power structures. One of the earliest examples is the Hong Kong Blondes—a group that disrupted computer networks in China in the 1990s so people could get access to blocked websites. The Hong Kong Blondes were in turn assisted by a Texas-based hacker group called the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), which helped them with advanced encryption technology. In 2006 the cDc subsequently waged a PR campaign against Google (calling it Goolag) when Google caved in to Chinese censorship demands. Their slogan: "Goolag: Exporting censorship, one search at a time."

Examples of hacktivism by other groups have included denizens of the rowdy, transgressive and scatological 4Chan website, operating under the name Anonymous, in its assault on attempted censorship by the Church of Scientology, using a series of denial-of-service attacks against Scientology websites. Anonymous also moved against the Iranian government during the 2009 elections, when it established a website that shared information from inside Iran and provided advice to Iranian activists on how to encrypt and safely transmit communications. Another notable example is a group of Portuguese hackers called Urban Ka0s, which protested the Indonesian government’s treatment of East Timor by hacking Indonesian government websites in the 1990s and posting alternative pages that protested the government’s policies.

The political compass of these hacktivist groups has never pointed true right or true left—at least by our typical way of charting the political landscape. They have been consistently unified in their adherence to the basic hacker principles as outlined by Levy and The Mentor in the 1980s: information should not be hoarded by powerful constituencies—it needs to be placed in the hands of the general public. This principle is followed even to the point of threatening to become a "foolish consistency"—as in the recent document dump from WikiLeaks, which drew the rebuke of five human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, because, they felt, civilian sources were not adequately protected.

As described in Khatchadourian’s New Yorker profile, Assange’s philosophy blends in seamlessly with the hacktivist tradition: it can’t be characterized in terms of left versus right so much as individual versus institution. In particular, Assange holds that truth, creativity, etc. are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, or what he calls "patronage networks," and that much of illegitimate power is perpetuated by the hoarding of information.

Meanwhile, in a profile of Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, the man accused of leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the New York Times considered many explanations for what Manning did. He was troubled because "classmates made fun of him for being gay"; he was "ignored" by his superiors; he was "self-medicating." Curiously elided was what Manning actually said his motivation was. In a May 25 conversation, the hacker Adrian Lamo asked Manning why he gave the information to WikiLeaks when he could have sold it to Russia or China and "made bank." Manning replied in true hacktivist fashion, "Because it’s public data…it belongs in the public domain…information should be free…if it’s out in the open…it should [do the] public good."

The traditional media, governments and their security organizations just cannot get unglued from the idea that there must be a single mastermind behind an operation like WikiLeaks. While this model works great in fictional dramas, it does not track what is really happening. This is not a one-man or even one-group operation. It is a network of thousands motivated by a shared hacktivist culture and ethic. And with or without Assange, it is not going away.