This evening, I was amused to see last night's Daily Show discussing Wikileaks as regards transparency vs privacy:

Jon: For more on the story, we go to our senior intelligence correspondent, Aasif Mandvi. Aasif? Aasif? What is all this Wikileaks?

Aasif: This is the 21st century, what I'm calling, The Information Age, a glorious, utopian datascape in which everyone has the right to know everything about everyone. It's why I get to see your penis at the airport.

Jon: You don't get to, I'm not gonna let you see my penis ...

Aasif: Why? ... What are you hiding?

Jon: I'm hiding my penis.

Aasif: Oh. Oh, really? (Jon: Yes) Is there something about your penis you don't want us to know about? (Facing crowd) Are you in favor or are you not in favor of transparency?

Jon: But Aasif, that's not transparency. Transparency is being open to the public on important issues and processes so that the public can make informed decisions ...

Aasif: Aah, wrong again, Rip van old grandpa man. Transparency is about me knowing everything I don't already know, because if I don't know it, that means someone's keeping it from me, (points at Jon) like your penis.

Jon: So you're, you're, you're ... my penis is a metaphor.

Aasif: Sure if that helps you sleep at night.

Jon: Alright, ya know? Should everything be out there? If there's total transparency, we won't really see anything.

Aasif: Ooooh, (steering wheel motion) I'm an old 20th century man, driving my car to get "food."

Jon: (puzzled, looks to audience for help) People still do that, you don't do that? I'm not that much older than you!

Aasif: Well, there's only one way to find out. Let's count the rings on your penis.

Jon: That's not how you find out! Enough with the penis already.

Aasif: I know Jon, I'm annoying you. But it's that kind of dogged persistence that's the hallmark of a free press. That's why this wikileaks dump is so important. It's basically our generation's Pentagon Papers.

Jon: Well, uhhh ... The Pentagon Papers exposed blatant lies, about how the government got us into the Vietnam war, about how they continued to mislead us on the war's progress. Even the most cycnical reading of these documents, I don't think rises to that indictable level of ...

Aasif: Uh, it's not meant to, man, it's about the beautiful anarchy of information. It shows that what the government says in private is not necessarily what it says in public.

Jon: But who doesn't know that? That seems like a relatively banal point to be made. Not all information is equal though, Aasif.

Aasif: (makes over the head motion and sound) And that's why your fly will always be up, and my generation's will always be down.

Jon: (hesitantly) Your ... Your fly is down?

Aasif: Always.

But before I got home, saw the Daily Show, and realized I should have blogged about my penis instead of OBIT, I was reading the Daily Dish, where Andrew Sullivan referenced, and lauded, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government” on zunguzungu, which includes a link to a PDF of what they claim are Assange's own essays.

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

    Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The Assange writing about regime change above seems a good bit more revolutionary than the Assange who told Forbes that he simply wanted to bring about a more ethical business environment.

You’ve developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.

Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a difficult thing to do, and I’ve been in countries where institutions are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don’t come from nowhere. ...

WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.

And zunguzungu (Aaron Bady) has his own take:

... Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy.

So he's anti-authoritarian - there are worse things to be.

... Assange ... decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire.

So I think I've answered my own question, "Who are these guys?" They aren't merely journalists, bringing truth to power like say, Amy Goodman. They are revolutionaries, committed to throttling the invisible government behind the ostensible government.

Update:

In his blog entry, The Ambitions of Julian Assange, Ross Douthat quotes Will Wilkinson:

To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.

But while he agrees with the zunguzungu opinion that Wikileaks seeks to throttle that unelected state, Douthat can't see them actually succeeding:

The hyperbole of certain Republicans notwithstanding, Assange is not a terrorist. But he has this much in common with al Qaeda: In response to what they perceive as the inherent injustice of the American empire, both the jihadis and the Australian anarchist are willing to take steps that they know will make the United States more imperial in the short term — in Al Qaeda’s case, acts of terrorism that inspire American military interventions in the Muslim world; in Assange’s case, information dumps that inspire ever-greater secrecy and centralization in the federal bureaucracy — in the hopes that the system will eventually collapse under its own weight and “more open forms of governance” (or, I suppose, a global caliphate) can take its place.

The problem, though, is that the American national security state is almost certainly more resilient than either Assange or Osama bin Laden seems to think. Which means that their efforts at sabotage have little chance (by design) of prompting any actual reforms in the system they despise, a vanishingly small chance of actually bringing the whole thing to its knees — and a substantial chance of just making life worse for everybody, inside and outside the United States government alike.

It may be cathartic for critics of state power to cheer when Assange sticks an online thumb into leviathan’s eye. But WikiLeaks is at best a temporary victory for transparency, and it’s likely to spur the further insulation of the permanent state from scrutiny, accountability or even self-knowledge.