Wikileaks document dump: not a triumph for anti-war forces, and not likely to result in War Crimes prosecutions

The giant Wikileaks document-dump has taken place, and all of the usual political elements are in place to regard this as a victory for anti-war, and international law proponents. Superficially, this is true, insofar as US national military forces are dismayed by the release, and insofar as the detailed reports of war are off-putting to many people.

Blunt assessment. Wikileaks release does not legally threaten any significant war-crimes issue for the US, or for any significant number of US soldiers. Moreover, these leaks are more likely to support more war-making than not. Why?

There are two potential US war crimes listed in this article.

1.

Insurgents try to surrender to helicopter gunship, and are gunned down. Unnattractive, and one can easily envision how technological advancement would create additional ethical problems, but US Army lawyer is correct. Individual soldiers cannot surrender to attack aircraft.

The easiest means of understanding this is to use the reciprocity principle. Can attack aircraft or a bomber surrender to an anti-aircraft battery? Not really, and in the same way, ground forces cannot practically surrender to aerial units, except possibly, when large military units engage in mass surrender.

This becomes all the more clear when one considers that aerial assault normally engages forces which are surrounded by their compatriots. Even if one were to imagine that helicopters could drop down to pick up the prisoners (something which is not in fact true, because helicopters will normally have either a configuration, or a load of friendly forces which prevent this) the surrounding enemy forces would attack the aircraft when it slows and enters a vulnerable takeoff and landing phase.

Even for enemy soldiers on the front lines, surrender would require advancing accross no-mans land to meet the enemy. It is unlikely that the soldiers who wanted to surrender would be able to do so on many occasions, because their military compatriots beside and behind them would not allow this. As a practical matter, attack aircraft perform more as munitions than as merciful soldiers in war.

2.

Hundreds of civilians killed at US military checkpoints. Use of completely lethal force, without any particular restraint meets the proportionate use of force standards required in international law because of the use of suicide bombing attack vehicles by Iraqi resistance elements.

Beyond any question of accidental running of military checkpoints by Iraqis, it is highly believable that Iraqi civilians would in fact attempt to run military checkpoints because of the large number of criminals who set up checkpoints for the purposes of theft, and often kidnapping. Thus, while trigger happy action by US forces is likely enough, nothing about gunning down a civilian family stands out as a likely abuse on the basis of the existance of such casualties.

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I would further note that the Wikileaks documents indicate that Iranian forces supported insurgents, trained forces which kidnapped/prisoner-snatched US military personell, and provided chemical weapons for terrorist use.

This information is very likely to be at least partially untrue, and even in the case that it was not, would fall under the heading of covert actions by states, which should be expected, and which would better be ignored on a small scale, than dealt with openly.

With the open release of these reports, the most significant effect will be the strengthening of the hands of those supporting a war with Iran.

It is in fact, not unlikely that the person or persons who leaked this information, in fact did so as a way of boosting US Iranian tensions. Indeed it is quite possible that a foreign intelligence service was involved in this leak, with most of the nations in the Mideast, and several Lebanese and Iraqi factions being likely candidates for such action. Many of these nations have the necessary capabilities due to proximity of US forces, technical skill, or the presence of large numbers of expatriates, or ethnic compatriots in the US military (particularly important to Lebanese factions).

I do not say that Wikileaks is necessarily a great force for evil because of this, but the release of these reports is not a great triumph for the anti-war movement considering just what was released, and considering the timing of the release, after such point as withdrawal from Iraq has become a moot point from a political standpoint in the US.



This is an excellent example of how government leaks can be more a matter of law-breaking, or civil-disobedience, than a matter of simple government openness.

Paparazzi for the state

Here is a rather unhappy development.

At paparazzi schools in South Korea, students are taught how to stalk their prey and get them on film, but it's not the celebrities they're after, just ordinary citizens committing minor crimes.

As the article details, the South Korean government has instituted a set of rewards paid to people informing on the minor infractions of their neighbors, be it smoking in non-smoking areas, to littering. Not only have these measures empowered the busybodies of society, but the rewards are sufficiently large that a new class of professional informers have emerged, the ssu-parazzi (garbage paparazzi) trained at private academies in the techniques of celebrity hunting journalists, and equipped with hidden cameras to catch more media-shy prey.

A global threat?

While most of us, indeed even people with scant sympathy towards wealthy and camera-shy celebrities, are likely to be disgusted by this harassment of the common man or woman, do we all need to be actually concerned by this development? After all, it is not difficult to find abuses of most any sort in some corner of the globe, and Korea has a very long history of oppressive government monitoring. Even in the 15'th, and 17'th centuries, in service of a feudalistic system that bound peasants to the land, Koreans were forced to carry Hopae , identification tags made of metal or wood containing their personal information; a rather noxious combination of the bureaucratic and the medieval.

Without further indication of such a scheme actually in the works, I do not think that it is possible to predict that something so strange as the ssu-parazzi ARE coming to the rest of the world, but the barrier to such a development or other pervasively intrusive monitoring in pursuit of trivial offenses might be lower than you think.

New moralities open doors for new methods of enforcement

In the first place, the motivations behind the use of informants in Korea are not obsolete and decrepit. Iran and Saudi Arabia for example, have morality police that pursue people for petty offenses that generally have little effect on others. While these nations are likely to to remain socially conservative, the necessity for specialized morality police gives the game away. Only a special force could be relied on to take up the chase because the offenses in question are so trivial that the regular police would tend to ignore them. This structure confirms the widely circulated reports that most Saudis and Iranians are not inclined to support social strictures as strict as are now imposed. The sorts of novel oppressions that these nations might now devise are unlikely to spread because so extreme a manifestation of the belief system that supports them is itself decrepit and crumbling.

By contrast, the offenses that South Korean informants are chasing are those connected with widespread emerging moralities. Anti-smoking rules are expanding rapidly, both in the sense that these rules are spreading internationally, and in the sense that their scope is widening. A ban on smoking outdoors would have been unimaginable a generation ago, but today legal proposals are being made that smoking in your own apartment should be forbidden.

Environmentalism has recently taken on a moralistic and quasi-religious tone, with traditional religious authorities jumping on the bandwagon; the Vatican declaring pollution a mortal sin for example.

These new modern sins are what the ssu-parazzi pursue, targeting smokers, littering, and shopkeepers who give away free plastic bags ( apparently forbidden by a regulation designed to prevent waste, and likely related to other pollution-minded plastic bag bans seen throughout the world). When there is a shift in morality, with new taboos emerging, otherwise offensive measures to enforce these taboos begin to seem increasingly reasonable.

The ongoing redefinition of privacy


One of the distinctive features about the most swiftly advancing portions of modern technology (including the Internet) is that these technologies facilitate the documentation of an increasingly large portion of our lives, and enable the gathered information to be arranged into a meaningful and revealing whole.

When a person has a conversation with a person over the phone, walks past a store with surveillance cameras, or makes a purchase, they generate recorded data.

Each of these actions has a ready equivalent going back thousands of years, and each of these actions might have been noted by various people in the past.

A shopkeeper can recognize a person that makes a purchase, or walks by his store, and anyone who had a conversation would leave a memory with the other person in the conversation at least.

Anybody wanting to reconstruct these events however, would either need the cooperation of all of the many people who interacted with an individual, or would need to follow the targeted person while attempting to avoid detection in their surveillance. Either questioning a person's associates or dogging their footsteps would require extraordinary effort, and neither course of action would be practical against the majority of the population.

Increasingly however, information of this type on everyone resides in a few databases. Once entrance to these databases has been obtained, every one's activities are revealed. This obviously has privacy implications, as intrusions that would previously been ruled out due to impracticality, now become a threat to everyday life. A person might instinctively sense that something is immoral, or in this case, intrusive and a violation of privacy, but in defining what is permissible or not, a definition of privacy, and implicit with this, the listing of the boundaries of privacy becomes necessary.

America: legitimization of the parts triggers legitimization of the whole

The US legal response to the development of modern electronic data gathering and storage.
has been limited, with the courts concluding that as long as the individual transactions and bits of data in a database were legally and legitimately obtained, the compilation of this information to create a picture of a person's life is legitimate as well. Accordingly, companies have sprung up to compile all available pieces of information in order to target advertising, provide credit ratings, and the like.

While legal, the pervasive databasing of personal information is not favored by the public. Indeed the awareness of the threat of pervasive surveillance has recently been turned into law with the introduction of anti-stalker laws. However, anti-stalker laws are legally, if not always socially interpreted as being strictly anti-harassment measures, not as recognition to a right to privacy against the threat of cocooning, but bit by bit legal, information gathering.

While the public thus might oppose the pervasive collection of their personal information, this collection remains protected by law, and should this remain true, over time the legal standard is likely to drag the social standards into line behind it.

The boundaries of privacy in the US are thus being drawn as functions of trespass, i.e. nobody can place a camera in your living room without your permission. The ssu-parazzi however (unlike many a paparazzo) , are not distinguished by their trespass into restricted space, but are distinguished by their pervasive monitoring of the public. As there are already many private companies which profit by pervasively monitoring the public, the addition of the fact that the ssu-parazzi report on illegality is not likely to stand out as distinctively offensive if the public comes to accept pervasive monitoring.

Europe: privacy as government access monopoly

In Europe, by contrast, private industry is considerably restricted in their ability to profit by trawling through the data of the public. There are several strands of thought behind European privacy regulations. The strongest would seem to evolve from the fact that particular private facts would be most disruptive were they revealed to particular individuals. In most cases when a person particularly seeks privacy against the knowledge of someone, that someone is not working for the government in an official capacity. Of course most of the things that a person would prefer to remain private would likewise be of little interest or significance to an advertiser or the bank either, meaning that if this logic is accepted fully, then the widespread US commercial data gathering would likewise be of little importance. Such commercial information compilers are much more restricted in Europe however. State information gathering is much less restricted, and other than regulation mandating that the government grant proper permits to itself, there is little to stop security and law enforcement from prying where it will.

At this point it would be common to praise the European privacy protections, and sneer a bit at US distrust of government. Certainly a sneer at the US would be in order, even if the criticism is quite precisely targeted given the fact that virtually no protection against privatized privacy violations has been provided, and to top it off, the US government has lately engaged in pervasive 'trespass' violations of private communication, despite the law.

The real deterioration of privacy in Europe can be seen however, if one tries to project comparable government and private behaviors back in time. Would a European nation in the 18'th or 19'th century have been praised for its protection of privacy if shopkeepers were forbidden from swapping information on sales, so as to target customers, but all such information was required to be submitted to the secret police? Would it have been a triumph of personal privacy if a butcher could not try to listen in on conversations in the pub, or seek out gossip to find out when somebody was having a party (and hence a sales opportunity), BUT the bartender was REQUIRED to take notes on all conversations he overheard, and keep those notes for the convenience of the secret police? Most of Europe requires that the telecom and Internet providers provide this governmental access to private communications and indeed in many cases, requires that the companies keep detailed records of citizen communications for the convenience of the "security services".

One may of course, fuss about terrorism, but the proverbial "bomb-throwing" radical has been around for a long time, and it was a rare government in Europe in the last few hundred years that did not face the threat of invasion, political revolution, or coup, any one of which would threaten more people than any thinly-supported Islamic radical in Europe could today.

In Europe, the boundaries of privacy have been set on the boundary of private action. Governmental actions taken to enforce the law or protect the public against a "security threat" are discounted as serious privacy violations.

Looking at the ssu-parazzi, they are after all, assisting in the enforcement of the law, and while smoking is scarcely a terrorism threat, an enthusiastic public-health campaigner will have little difficulty in claiming that secondhand smoke is an equal problem. Frankly, terrorism (defined as radical or extremist attack on the public, as opposed to actions taken by the state to terrorize the public into obedience) simply does not kill very many people, and while secondhand smoke deaths are not common, nor are the statistics for such a threat of the best stability, the figures being thrown about, such as 40,000 deaths supposedly induced by secondhand smoke though heart disease, are much higher than terrorism deaths.

Littering is perhaps, less of a public health threat, but environmentalists do not seem to have much difficulty in transmuting a particular environmental threat into the survival of life of earth itself.

That the surveillance serve the officially-defined public interest is simply not enough of a protection to preclude pervasive violation of privacy. Custom throughout the world would presently bar the ssu-parazzi and the informant system behind them, but custom has a way of yielding to the defined logic and ethics of society. If we do not wish to face the privacy intrusions of celebrities, and face them without the wealth and power that accrues to their status, then all of us, around the world need to insist on privacy and insist on a logic of rights and freedoms that will secure privacy through the continued evolution of technology.