Abstract
WikiLeaks is among the most controversial institutions of the last decade, and this essay contributes to an understanding of WikiLeaks by revealing the philosophical paradigm at the foundation of Julian Assange’s worldview: cypherpunk ethics. The cypherpunk movement emerged in the early-1990s, advocating the widespread use of strong cryptography as the best means for defending individual privacy and resisting authoritarian governments in the digital age. For the cypherpunks, censorship and surveillance were the twin evils of the computer age, but they viewed encryption as a means to circumvent both. As a cypherpunk, Assange advocates for the use of cryptography in the fight for individual privacy as well as the fight for global justice. His cosmopolitan disposition is informed by his hacker background, antiwar principles, and Enlightenment outlook. This essay places Assange’s philosophical idea in historical context, exploring his views on censorship, surveillance, and the right to communicate. It also connects his cypherpunk principles to WikiLeaks, showing that the strategy of encouraging data leaks from powerful political and economic organizations is classic cypherpunk political praxis.
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Notes
To insure against changing URLs and disappearing content, most of the web sources cited in this article are referenced using the “archive.fo” service. Going to the URLs in the References will allow you to access the archived webpage and also access the original link.
During the 1990s, Crypto Wars 1.0 (as it is called now) raged (see Levy 2001), but following Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA mass surveillance in 2013, Crypto Wars 2.0 emerged. The most famous battle of Crypto Wars 2.0 was the FBI’s attempt to pressure Apple to break compromise the encryption on the iPhone’s software. For more, see Meinrath and Vitka (2014).
To be sure, Dreyfus and Assange (2012) also note that there were hackers in the United States who also gained access to government and corporate networks by identifying and exploiting their security weaknesses. I have just drawn a distinction between “American” and “Australian” hackers for clarity of argument.
Despite some of the intellectual similarities between Assange and the other cypherpunks, their obvious differences caused a great deal of conflict. As tech journalist Andy Greenberg (2012) explains, Young was initially involved with WikiLeaks, but he quickly grew tired of what he perceived as Assange’s liberal-reformist rhetoric; he accused the website of being a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and leaked an early WikiLeaks email list to Cryptome.org. “Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent,” Young blasted Assange. “Same old shit, working for the enemy” (p. 132). Similarly, though May had nearly conceived of a WikiLeaks-esque system himself, he did not put these ideas into practice like Assange. Cypherpunk and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum has commented that May “could have created WikiLeaks himself and made a real difference in the world” if he wasn’t “a fucking racist” (p. 92). But for May, lacking the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Assange, “the idea of trying to be Julian Assange gives me the creeps.” “I’m not concerned about things like that. Let the Africans kill each other,” May insists. “I don’t have those kinds of political interests” (p. 91–91).
Cryptocurrencies are the cypherpunk means for defending the right to transact. See note 2 above and also Assange et al. (2012).
There is perhaps one exception, and that is Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee who the government has accused of leaking documents that WikiLeaks published under the name of Vault 7 in early 2017. The New York Times described Vault 7 as “thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions” (Shane, Rosenberg & Lehren 2017). Though Schulte was arrested in August 2017, the government waited over a year to charge him with leaking the documents. This was probably because “The government had no direct proof that Mr. Schulte sent the files to WikiLeaks. Instead, prosecutors relied on circumstantial evidence” (Hong 2020b). Meanwhile, the government is charging Schulte with possession of child pornography, but again, the evidence is flimsy. “Investigators obtained a search warrant to enter his New York City apartment,” wrote the Times, “where they found dozens of electronic devices and more than 10,000 images and videos of child pornography, buried under three levels of encryption” (Hong 2020a). This case demonstrates the importance of educating the public about encryption, for no one—not even the US government—simply “finds” anything “buried under three levels of encryption.” Unfortunately, reporting on the matter does not explain exactly how the government broke any of the encryption, let alone three layers. One would think that if the government could break encryption so easily, it would not repeatedly claim that law enforcement is “going dark” under the increasing use of encryption as part of Crypto Wars 2.0 (see Meinrath & Vitka 2014).
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Anderson, P.D. Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful: the cypherpunk ethics of Julian Assange. Ethics Inf Technol 23, 295–308 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09571-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09571-x
