Pandora's Box by Waterhouse
Most people judging Wikileaks as morally wrong focus on the issue of the burning of sources mentioned in cables and documents -- they could face not only embarrassment but persecution and death. Soldiers and dissidents and diplomats could all be harmed.
And all that's true, although we haven't seen it work that way -- yet. And would we know if it did? Wikileaks leaks other people's secrets -- mainly America's! -- but doesn't go on leaking to follow up to see if it did harm. We wouldn't learn about the adverse consequences from them. And if the U.S. is trying to minimize the seeming harm, would it be in the government's best interests to say if Wikileaks scored in this way? I would hope, in fact, that we could get this information -- because it would help in the long-term effort to quell the anarchic thuggery of Wikileaks.
Yet there's also the issue of democracy, transparency and accountability -- of Wikileaks itself, as an operation or loose organization or movement. It has none of those things. People involved are mainly anonymous. They ask for donations by banking accounts -- but we don't know how much they raise or how much they spent, or on what. They don't say what their aspirational goals are, or whether they have any creed or ideology -- there's only the taunting slogan "We open governments."
Except they don't. They only open *one* government, pretty much, the U.S. The others only become displayed to the extent the U.S. engages with them, and much of the time, it's unflattering and damaging to the U.S., not anyone else. Timothy Garton-Ash makes a strange effort to make lemonade out of lemons by describing, for example, William Burns' literary talents in describing a Dagestani wedding where Kadyrov is present and concluding that U.S. diplomatic efforts make the diplomatic corps look good. Maybe so. But they'd look even better if their secrets weren't dumped.
The nature of Wikileaks itself and the contrary, secretive, unaccountable essence of its own operation are, of course, a problem, and one not commented on often. As is the one-sided nature of their "opening" -- it's never the Kremlin, the Taliban, the Iranian ayatollahs and *their* plans and *their* assessments that we ever get from this bunch.
In that sense, Micah Sifry's tweet that Wikileaks represents an "open society" is a disgraceful perversity -- and I told him so. You can hardly compare a society that is open *by consent* and by voluntary disclosure of the governed and the governing to vandals who forcibly pry open what is rightly closed. How strange that Micah answers that I "of all people" should be interested in this openness?! Like all the opensource thugs, Wikileaks violates the principle of opt-in; and indeed there is not even an opt-out.
Yes, most of all, what's wrong with Wikileaks is that it is achieved by force, without consent and without knowledge. It's Bolshevist, in that a group of people arrogantly usurp to themselves power, without democratic legitimacy, in the name of revolutionary expediency (and here, it's not even clear what the revolution is for, except to undermine the leader of the Western world for the sake of hackerish info-anarchy).
So it's not the American people, through their elected representatives, and their president who appoints various officials to preside over diplomacy and classification of documents. That democratic, institutionalized process is loathed and hated by Wikileaks. Here, we have the most liberal president in history, right? With the most open government, with Gov 2.0 prying open government to view all over town, right? And that's not enough? And it's *now* that we get these dumps, not under Bush? Something wrong with this picture.
While it's customary on the hard left and among the "progressives" to imagine that the U.S. is some evil bulwark and oppressive force, in fact, there are few governments in the world more open. Few have the kind of levers to uncover information that the U.S. has with its free press and the Freedom of Information Act.
This is how we have to think of the moral problem of Wikileaks: If most people were able to have a chance to vote on the issue of whether or not to expose all the diplomatic cables of the United States and all the classified secrets about, say, diplomacy with Iran, they would likely vote *no*. I think most would prefer to have Congress deliberate these issues, and to have the elected executive, President Obama, and his chosen Secretary of State Clinton, decide what should be said and not said. These institutions, after all, are democratically and openly created. If you *didn't* like them, you could vote to change them -- and in fact, that's what people did -- and could do again!
By contrast, the thugs at Wikileaks simply crowbarred the door open and dumped everything out merely because...they can. Because they got a lucky break due to a combination of sullen malice from the perpetrator Sgt. Manning and the negligence of security arrangements.
I don't know why information isn't more compartmentalized -- in fact in compartments like a ship, where if one is compromised, it is localized and not every section is flooded. At least, not like it was on the Titanic...But in part, it was due to the modern fashion for silo-breaking, so that information isn't in vertical silos and unavailable for collaboration. Wikitarianism in the minds of the U.S. government's internal network architects is as much to blame for this outrageous diplomatic compromise as the wikitarianism of Wikileaks itself. As I've always said, it's usually only a few who benefit from the false collectives of wikis...
I bet some people doubt that a democratic and fair vote as to whether this sort of leakage should be approved would lead to people voting *against* Wikileaks. I don't. And the problem is, like people living in a totalitarian society, we didn't *get* to vote. It's our country and our diplomats and our documents -- and we *didn't get to chose*. It was unaccountably leaked in spite of us.
I was interested to see a blog called The Acorn where the author pondered the consequences, post-Wikileaks, and the return to information silos.
There are very few voices raised in condemnation of Wikileaks -- the left and right both are gloating at Obama's discomfort, for their reasons. This writer had no qualms about condemning the act morally, and also practically -- the government cannot function in a Pantopticon:
If everything a government official says and writes is liable to become public the next moment, you will only have self-censorship, political correctness and worse, a greater tendency to avoid putting debates and decisions on record.
The Acorn believes that the net effect is going to be a worsening secrecy and lack of disclosure from a government that had, in fact, been quite open -- I would say more than any in history -- and a change in the way data are handled:
What might happen is that brakes will be applied in the trend towards sharing of information within government and across departmental silos. A process that began as a result of the US intelligence community’s failure to piece together data that could have led to the uncovering of the 9/11 plot—and was adopted by governments across the world, including in India—might come to an end with abuse of technological power by Wikileaks. ‘Information fusion’ within governments is likely to be the first casualty of Mr Assange’s war on responsibility.
Meanwhile, a disgraceful Guardian blog adds insult to injury banging on State Department legal advisor Harold Koh for condemning the leaks and urging Wikileaks to cease and desist. It's bad enough the secret documents of the U.S. are forcibly leaked against the will of the people; but Pratap Chatterjee wants the U.S. government then to somehow roll over, and for guardians of human rights like Koh to acquiesce in the Wikileaks criminality.
Why? I would challenge Chatterjee to find anything illegal in the actions of the diplomats that have been exposed by this wikidump. No doubt analysts will focus on the instructions to diplomats at the UN to gather humint about the Secretary General. Perhaps. Or maybe it is due diligence in preventing another scandal like the "oil for food" being launched from our shores? In any event: show me the violations, I'm not seeing it, just because somebody provides a frank characterization of the Persian character or tries to gather Arab allies in the job of containing Iran's nuclear mischief.
Chatterjee goes off on a tangent to fuss that the U.S. doesn't have the right to assassinate terrorists. I think likely more context is needed here. Are these just any enemies of the U.S., or terrorists for whom there is "probable cause"? Who have attacked the U.S.? War is not illegal, more's the pity for the human rights purist. In any event, even if Koh turns out to have committed a human rights sin here by endorsing targeted assassinations, that doesn't mean Wikileaks is entitled to expose people to danger and undermine *a democratic, freely-elected government*. Once again: how come it's never the tyrants who are undermined?!
After the last disgraceful round of Wikileaks, the leakers must have felt *some* moral pressure because they talked about how the next round would involve "kompromat" (compromising material) on Russia and other countries, finally exposing authortiarians instead of democrats.
I'm not seeing it. I saw *one* cable on Russia in the Guardian data base, and the Dagestani wedding doesn't really tell us anything that undermines the Kremlin; if anything, it's yet another advertisement for why it should be feared.
Is it any accident, comrades, that Evgeny Morozov was out in front cheering the Wikileakers, chortling that now the entire USG gets to go through a Rapiscan like the TSA, earning himself a fete at the NYT Lede? Where's the leaks that undermine the Kremlin, Zhenya?
Self-acknowledged red diaper-baby and RT regular Fred Weir, who always craftily appears to be critical of Russia, yet is always morally equivocating it with the West, wrote only a month ago that we were going to be getting some mother lode of kompromat on Russia, citing Izvestia. Nu? Where is it, Fred? I'm not seeing anything remotely like what you described. His article October 26 in the Christian Science Monitor achieved a spinning of the growing questioning of Wikileaks as anti-American and always in one direction -- and yet it never delivered. Will Fred, let along Kommersant or Moscow News or Izvestia, return to note that their speculative spin didn't pan out? Or will they claim there is still a kompromat dump to come?
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