For insight into what makes Wikileaks tick, we turn to KGB mole Aldrich Ames.
You might remember the site from recent coverage of its exploits. Earlier this month, for instance, it raised the ire of the Mormon Church for posting documents relating to its secret temples. Before that, Wikileaks published high-level documents from the Church of Scientology (whose contents I surveyed and could not possibly disclose, except to say that they were hopelessly goofy).
All of which might give you the impression that the increasingly prominent site is chiefly concerned with airing the rituals of secret societies. But the press it's been getting has been misleading. Banned in China, sued in America, Wikileaks aims to be a global anti-corruption outfit, an untouchable leaking platform for whistleblowers.
It describes itself as a group of "Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up-company technologists." So far, it's held its own in the face of legal and political threats. Go digging through the site's archives, and you'll find a collection of whistleblowing documents: operating manuals from Guantanamo Bay, secret orders from the Islamic courts in Somalia, government looting in Kenya.
What's driving all of this, though, is a simple idea, and this brings us back to Ames. Trying to explain its mission, Wikileaks' public-relations material offers a doozy of a theory about the CIA officer who sold information about American operatives to the Russians for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
"Between 10 and 20 people were killed or imprisoned as a result," the site explains. "Had Ames disclosed the information publicly, these people would have taken appropriate defensive measures in the first instance. In addition, the CIA would have been encouraged to improve not only its behaviour, but also its operational security and the treatment of its employees."
The real problem with Ames, postulates Wikileaks, isn't that he blew open the American spying operation or sold out his country, but that he leaked the information in private, instead of public. It was less an act of betrayal, see, and more a case of whistleblowing done poorly. If only he'd just posted the names of U.S. operatives on the Internet instead!
For Wikileaks, the idea of national interest just doesn't factor into it. The group (which didn't respond to an interview request) seems to have a simple bottom line: Privacy belongs to citizens, not governments. And governments need to be transparent, even if that transparency needs to be wrung from them.
It's an old tension, and not a surprising one considering that the site is descended from cryptographers and political dissidents, profoundly suspicious of authority in any form. And authority feels the same way back: If there's one thing that police forces have never liked, even in democratic countries, it's the prospect of citizens encrypting information in ways that can't be cracked or traced.
And that's exactly what Wikileaks wants to do. The site uses a heavily modified version of the same open-source software that drives Wikipedia, though there is no other connection between the two organizations. Wikileaks invites the public to discuss, and annotate its content. They also say their software will allow untraceable leaking, erasing whistleblowers' digital footprints.
Needless to say, Wikileaks hasn't been winning many friends among the corporations and countries it's been tweaking. The result has been a cat-and-mouse game, as the site uses a combination of globe-skimming legal strategies and technological implements to stay ahead of those who'd shut them down.
In February, for instance, Wikileaks came under fire from a Swiss bank after posting 14 documents relating to their customers' transactions. The individuals behind Wikileaks are, for the most part, anonymous and dispersed throughout the world. Meanwhile, the computers that run the site are reported to be in Sweden, which has been noted for being a permissive jurisdiction. (And should Sweden clamp down, there are always countries with looser laws to be found.)
The bank, therefore, attacked Wikileaks where it could: its domain name registrar in the United States, where it had taken out the address "wikileaks.org." It's analogous to the bank being unable to get a phone line disconnected, and resorting to suing the phone book for listing it.
The bank briefly got an injunction that temporarily took out the wikileaks.org address, but this was overturned after an intervention by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The bank backed off. Even if it hadn't, Wikileaks maintains a collection of alternative addresses to keep the site accessible, whether they be blocked in China or sued in the United States. Under fire wherever it goes, Wikileaks is an entity that's not so much illegal as agnostic to law in the first place.
It's hard to call it a multinational, because it doesn't really do the concept of nationhood in the first place. Instead - file-sharing hedonists aside - it's one of the first truly postnational institutions that the Internet has produced. It wants to skip above the sheriffs' heads, doing good as it perceives it. And it's willing to leverage every advantage the Internet provides to get there.