My thoughts on Wikileaks are fairly simple and un-nuanced compared to others trying to rationalize a way through the problem. The difference is my view of Wikileaks as a process and theirs as a finished and completed event.
Arianna Huffington says the debate is between “no government and too much media” or “too much government and no media”. If that is the choice, then she sides with Wikileaks. A better dyad is Clay Shirky’s “too much secrecy” or “too much transparency”. This choice is a bit more accurate, much less reductive but still inaccurate.
Shirky says complete transparency is bad because that means negotiations are impossible as people cannot modify their positions. I am not sure I agree with that. Positions are not static and transparency only reveals documents, which are snapshots and not movement amongst. I also have yet to find anyone describing a harm of transparency that does not rest upon an unnecessary need.
Most people writing about Wikileaks do not engage this debate. Sometimes they acknowledge the debate and then move on to easier ground: the government’s prosecution of Wikileaks through extrajudicial means is bad. This is Shirky’s error from a promising essay’s prolegomenon.
Wikileaks needs to be defended. Anonymous is now about 9,000 people, all defending Wikileaks with Denial of Service Attacks. Wikileaks needs vocal defense and justification.
American history, and not just American for that matter, is founded on direct action. Direct Action is when people move beyond the legal system and do not call upon another (person or group) to take rectifying action.
Wikileaks people (mainly Assange, but I want to avoid that conflation) think the government is too secretive. This is not a new complaint. FDR once voiced this very concern. Unlike others, though, Wikileaks’ mission is to uproot that secretiveness.
The supposed harm of Wikileaks is revealing documents that can have people killed or, at the least, chill their willingness to provide intelligence. I shall refer to this argument as the Humint Disadvantage. I am not persuaded by this claim.
Much of the highly sensitive material is not disclosed by Wikileaks. Remember that people are giving these documents to Wikileaks. Wikileaks is merely a publisher (this aspect of Wikileaks is also often overlooked in the debates about actions against Wikileaks.) That is why this latest batch did not have a single document rated higher than a ‘secret’. The truly sensitive material is not disclosed by Wikileaks. It is doubtful Wikileaks has even been given any of this material. After Mission Impossible it is easy to tell a story of some NOC List floating around, but that is not the material in question.
It is also not a given that Wikileaks publishes everything it is given. Assange is not an anarchist. Others in Wikileaks most definitely are not. Remember the defection in early 2010 as some people left/were ousted because they thought there ought to be more protections and redactions than Assange did. There is redaction going on, even the most transparency seeking organizer has admitted to that. The real damage has been embarrassment that some of these documents even exist and were classified. See the document about US/UK relations that is just a transcript of the infamous Rick Astley song. Maybe the kid spying you pick your nose could have been quiet about it, but to really avoid that embarrassment don’t pick your nose.
As for the argument that Wikileaks will cause humint to dry up: even if it is true, is that so bad? The protections mentioned (redaction and non-dissemination to Wikileaks) above also provide a reassurance to potential informants. The promise of amnesty and money also helps assure against the Wikileaks phenomenon. The humint argument has a further problem. If this (the status quo) is what we get out of good humint then how good can it be?
Afghanistan is a mess. Iraq is a mess. None of those people had any fear of Wikileaks and we have still made a mess of countries and people’s lives. The humint argument is so abstracted that it bears the same disconnection from reality as Bush’s “spreading of democracy.” I need to see something worth losing before I can cling to an abstracted possibility of a worse world.
Government transparency is good. We need a presumption in the direction of transparency. These days so many people think the government presumes in the realm of secrecy. Even if it is not true and history deems my perspective wrong, there needs to be more transparency. Wikileaks is a process in this regaining of control. Besides, how can history adequately judge when there is no transparent record to judge?
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
Shirky, Clay. (2010). Wikileaks and the long haul. www.shirky.com