I wrote a while ago that WikiLeaks was not an neutral NGO devoted to abstract ideals of transparency but an organization that is waging a deliberate information campaign against the United States and its national security organs. John Robb has helpfully linked to a paper Julian Assange wrote that gives us some insight into his thinking and confirmation of this strategic purpose.
Assange is a theorist of strategic attrition. He sees the enemy as "conspiracies" in the broadest sense, and compares them to cognitive computing devices that take information from the world, circulate it among themselves, and then act on it. It is a device that has inputs and outputs. A "conspiracy," however, is not a uniform body--it has a center and periphery, with different members having a different weight or effect. Assange sees his goal as reducing the overall cognitive power of the enemy organization by manipulating its inputs, lowering the information weight of high-weight members or crashing links altogether. The nonlinear dynamics of this moral attrition eventually add up to an squeezing of the organization and its overall cognitive collapse.
So the goal of Assange's organization is to serve as a device to accomplish these ambitious goals. Given that coercive options against WikiLeaks are rather limited and hardening of information security and operational security as a whole is already going on, there really is not much practical relevance to this new piece of information. It confirms what we already know: WikiLeaks is a tool of Julian Assange's personal Ahab-like crusade.
So has Assange been successful? In Boydian terms (which Robb uses to analyze him), no. WikiLeaks has gone against the core tenant of Boydian strategy: maximizing your opponent's weakness while minimizing your own. WikiLeaks' poor press and alienation of potential allies in the NGO community has isolated the organization. It's technical systems for receiving leaks have shut down. Internal dissent within the organization has been chronicled in numerous leaks to Cryptome. Assange is very much trapped within the Orientation phase of his own personal OODA Loop.
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