As you can see from - the - past - few - posts, I’ve been trying to quote and link to other people whose opinion reflects my own rather than write a huge long manifesto. (I’ve got a thesis I’m dreadfully behind on. But I won’t bore you with my problems.)
However, as the issue doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, I’ve decided maybe it would be better for me to just write my piece and get it off my chest. (Not that I’m under the illusion that this blog attracts enough readers to influence the public debate, but it will help me sleep better at night knowing I’ve said what I wanted to say.)
There are of course a lot of terrible things happening in the world everyday (famine, poverty, wars, etc), but this issue in particular seems to stand at a crossroads in history. From here we either go forward into a world where governments are more accountable and information is more accessible. Or we turn the corner into where it becomes illegal to publish any information that your government doesn’t like. And any student of history can tell you that once society gives up a right, it is very very difficult to get it back again.
(Anyone who has read “1984”, a novel in which information is meticulous controlled and manipulated by the government, can have little doubt where George Orwell’s opinions would be on this subject were he still alive.)
The attempts to shut down WikiLeaks by governments ought to alarm everyone. It is also scary the way the corporations (Amazon, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard) have fallen into line to deny WikiLeaks service.
All of this of course has coincidentally happened at the same time Julian Assange has been arrested on a rape charge, which admittedly muddies the water a bit. Although I’m still waiting to see how these rape charges play out in court, if Julian Assange is guilty of rape, he should go to prison for it. That in no way however means the United States government is justified in attempting to shut down his website.
On a personal level, Julian Assange may be less than likeable. He comes off as arrogant and eccentric in many of his interviews. The authoritarian style with which he runs WikiLeaks has reportedly alienated much of WiliLeaks volunteer staff. And then there’s the rape charges again. But this should not be about Assange’s cult of personality. This is about the structures and laws that govern who controls information.
It’s also about freedom and the republic.
Although I’m not a lawyer, it is more than possible that Julian Assange may have broken some laws. However one can only talk so far about the laws as they are currently written. Rather one must argue for the laws as they should be written, as when William Pitt argued against Slavery in the British Parliament, or Thomas Paine argued for freedom of speech in British courts, or Martin Luther King argued on the steps of Washington for an end to discrimination.
Because governments make the laws, it is not surprising that governments would make laws to protect itself against its people. Thus we have walking around in Washington, in perfect freedom, respected statesmen who organized illegal wars, bombed rice farming villages back into the stone age, planned coups, and assassinations in Latin America, mined harbors, dropped cluster bombs on civilian populations, massacred villages, used depleted uranium missiles and funded money to terrorists in Nicaragua. None of this is thought by our government to be worthy of punishment. But publishing information about this government, or exposing the government, is a crime. Therefore we see the absurdity of what happens when governments create laws. (In fact, some members of the government even have the audacity to call WikiLeaks a terrorist organization.)
If our republic were functioning the way it should, the idea of government secrecy should be an oxymoron. A republic means res publica—literally a public thing. A republican government is not some sort of private club for the elites, a republican government is our institution. We own it, we pay for it, we should control it and operate it, we should vote for our representatives based on informed decisions about what these leaders are actually doing, and we should be informed about how well they are representing our interests.
We have the right to keep secrets from the government. The government does not have the right to keep secrets from us.
The degree of freedom in a society can be measured to the extent that government is held responsible to the people, not to which people are held responsible to their government.
The higher up in government you are, the less right to privacy you should have. (At least as far as your government job goes. Your sex life you should be able to keep to yourself.) The lower your power, the more right to privacy you should have.
At least that’s the way it should be if this was actually a functioning republic.
Instead, over the past few years especially we’ve seen this principle put on its head. With all the counter-terrorism and surveillance legislation passed in the last 10 years, we now have a government which has lots of information on us, but we actually have very little information about our own government.
We are also in danger of creating a system in which the average citizen is forbidden from participating in democracy in any meaningful way other than to tick a box once every 4 years. And furthermore they are supposed to tick that box based only on the information that the government thinks it is appropriate for them to have. All other important decisions are then left to the government elites, based on information the rest of us just can not handle.
Politicians talk occasionally about creating government transparency, but left to themselves politicians will only be transparent as far as it is convenient for them to be transparent. And it is precisely at the times when it is inconvenient for them to be transparent that transparency is actually needed.
Obama was elected on a platform of creating more government transparency, but we’re still waiting to see this campaign promise actually fulfilled. WikiLeaks (and the whistle blowers who have contributed to it) have created much more transparency in the past few months than Obama has in his entire presidency to date.
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Addendum 1:
Part of what Wikileaks revealed was that the Australian member of the Labour Party, Arbib, has been passing on information about the inner workings of the Labour Party to the US embassy.
I don’t know if this made the papers back home, but it was definitely big news here.
Someone in the local paper made an excellent point the other day about the hypocrisy of this. The US government collects leaks from all sorts of informants around the world. This they consider perfectly okay. Arbib leaking to the US about the Labour Party is considered perfectly legal. But when someone else leaks information about the US government to the public, this is supposed to be illegal?
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Addendum #2
Governments are of course constantly telling us that they need secrecy to operate in, and that all of our lives would immediately be in danger if that cloak of government secrecy were to drop for one moment.
It should not of course surprise us that governments would tell us this. To create a culture in which everyone believes this means it’s very easy for government to operate the way they want to.
The fact that we’ve all been so easily brainwashed into believing it is however a bit surprising.
Personally I’m skeptical. If our government operated in complete transparency--if all the cabinet meetings, Oval Office chats, and members of the energy task force--were completely out in the open, I don't think the sky would collapse and we would all die.
Of course politicians would drastically have to change the way they do things. They wouldn't able to do back room deals, or plan coups in South America, but that's not the end of world.
I also think counter-terrorism could operate just as well out in the open as it could behind closed doors.
Recall for instance that September 11th happened not because there wasn’t enough government secrecy, but because there was too much. The CIA was watching the suspicious Saudi Arabian men who were taking flight lesson, but didn’t share this information with anyone else. So much information was labeled secret that the various law enforcement agencies were unable to work together.
Now imagine what would have happened if all of this information had been open and freely available to everyone.
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Addendum #3
Every high school sophomore knows the old adage that you don’t have the freedom of speech to yell fire in a crowded theater. Very few people know where the quote actually came from.
During World War I a group of Quaker Pacifists were trying to encourage young men not to join the army. The Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that this was illegal, and that this action wasn’t covered under their first amendment rights because, “you don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.” And thus a cliché was born.
The irony is of course that the Quakers were trying to save the men, and it was their own government which was hurling young men into the fire which was the European front in the biggest, bloodiest, and most pointless wars ever fought.
It’s worth remembering this little bit of historical context whenever someone tells you “you don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.”
It also established a pattern that holds true for just about any war ever fought. Governments send their young men and women into danger, and then when their citizens speak out against the war, governments accuse these citizens of putting the soldiers in danger.
When the government accuses WikiLeaks of putting US soldiers in danger, they are using the oldest trick in the censorship handbook. They’re also being incredibly hypocritical. If they really cared about the safety of the troops, they wouldn’t have sent them into the war.
I am very much concerned about the lives of the brave men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which is why I want them placed out of harms way and brought home immediately.
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One last note:
In private conversation the past few weeks, I had actually been trying to defend the Tea Party Movement to some of my friends.
Sure, I had said, the Tea Partiers allow themselves to be manipulated by wealthy tax cut advocates business and health insurance companies. But even though they’re a bit paranoid, Tea Partiers are aware that human society has only recently emerged from tyranny and feudalism, and that this freedom was the result of years of struggle, and they have a healthy desire to try and protect the gains we’ve made.
Sigh. You know every time I try and give the right-wing the benefit of the doubt, I just end up regretting it.
Maybe there are Conservative voices I’m not hearing over here. But based on the news coverage I’ve been getting, it seems like Sarah Palin, Mike Hukabee, and the right wing radio nuts have all been calling for Assange’s head.
These from the people who’ve been telling us for months you can’t trust the government to manage your health care or your tax dollars.
Look, guys, if you’re going to play the populist card at least be consistent. There’s no right more basic than the freedom of information. If you can’t trust the government to manage our health care, you can’t trust it to control what information we can and can’t receive.
And while I’m complaining about conservatives: guys, how come the people have a right to know under the intimate details of how President Clinton pleasures young interns [in case you forgot, go look up the congressional records from the 90s. The graphic details about the cigar are all in there] but we don’t have a right to know about what our government is actually doing?
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Okay, one last, final thought.
As should be obvious from reading all of the above, I'm not so much interested in debating the technicalities of the law as it is currently written so much as talking about the ideal of open and transparent government.
BUT...if one were inclined to sparse legalities here, an important distinction needs to be made between the people who actually leak the documents, and the media organizations that publish them.
Wikileaks didn't actually leak any of the material. It simply published it. As such, it needs to be considered as any other media organization.
Even assuming you grant a secret government, where all sorts of files are marked "top secret" and hidden in vaults behind security clearances and firewalls-- once something is leaked, it's leaked.
As a federal judge reportedly told the Nixon administration regarding the Pentagon Papers, once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't get it back inside again.
Once a secret document leaves the government's firewall and goes out into the public arena, the government can not silence the media from reporting on it. To grant the government this power is to go down a road we do not want to go down.
The media is under no obligation to suppress news stories that inconvenience or embarrass the government once it gets its hands on leaked documents.
Government secrecy is the government's priority. It is not, and should not be, the media's priority.
Link of the Day
Hopes and Prospects for Activism: "We Can Achieve a Lot"
I'm most surprised by how little of the reported content surprises me. CBC interviewed the guy at the Guardian who was sent the initial dossier -- leaks in the hundreds of thousands, which he's still poring over -- and he says every day is like Christmas. If that's the case, I have to wonder just how turgid and clueless the modern media environment really is, because there isn't a single thing they've published that's provoked a sharp intake of breath on my part. Everything I've read was already part of the internet framework: if a casual browser started at a fairly trivial site like Boing-Boing and hopped around from there, they'd have read most of this stuff months before it got "leaked."
ReplyDeleteI read a similar take on the "intelligence" used to justify the Iraq invasion. Anyone with a little facility with Google could see this stuff was patently fraudulent.
Having said all that, I'm still fudge a bit about the morality of just dumping this stuff out there. Complete transparency doesn't serve anyone well. Clay Shirky parses some of the fine points rather well, I think.
Yes, I'll grant that not all of this leaked stuff has the importance of the Pentagon Papers (to make the inevitable comparison.) But we shouldn't expect it to. The Pentagon Papers were a government report that someone in government thought was so vital to the public discourse that this set of documents had to be leaked at all cost.
ReplyDeleteWikileaks is set up as just an open site for people to dump whatever leaks they feel like. It shouldn't surprise us that not every single thing they publish doesn't completely blow our socks off.
To me the quality of the leaks is less of an issue than the principle--acknowledging that whistle blowers need protection, and the media outlets that publish leaks need to be protected from government censorship.
That being said, I think some of this stuff (the fact that the US government has been spying on UN diplomats, that we've been secretly bombing Yemen, the video of the journalists being shot down in Iraq) is important stuff.
If you're cynical enough, I guess nothing really surprises you anymore. But there's still value in having it all out in black and white in the public record.
Enjoyed the article you linked to. I didn't agree with all of it, of course, but it was well thought out and he makes a nice distinction between democratic legal remedies to the problem and the illegal ones our government seems to be pursuing, and the differences between leakers and publishers. All good points. But I still don't buy his argument that governments need some secrecy for negotiating room. he seems to almost be saying politicians need to lie to the public in order for international diplomacy to work. I have a hard time swallowing that principle, and I'd be afraid if we did swallow it, it could be used to excuse all sorts of things
"Cynical"? Well ... I hope not. In my defense I think most of the surprises dealt to me occurred when I was in University in the early/mid-80s. All I had to do was spend my lunches attending guest lectures by Central and South Americans who were desperate to raise awareness re: what was going on in El Salvador, Venezuela, Chile, etc. Throw in the "Liberation Theology Loons" I met in the church circuit, and I very quickly got a sharper sense of the news that the regular media outlets were pointedly ignoring.
ReplyDeleteSo 30 years on it still chafes me (to say the least) when I hear someone deeply entrenched in the UK News Echelons equate the sheer abundance of these predictable and unspectacular leaks with "Christmas." I don't think that residual bitterness can be exactly equated with cynicism.
sorry, I didn't mean that "you're cynical" as in you personally, but the general "you."
ReplyDeleteCynical perhaps, as you hinted at, is a bit of a loaded term. It's one of those loaded words that is used to turn a potentially postive trait into something negative sounding. It's good to be sceptical of what the government tells us.
I also take your point about the media coverage of the leaks being a bit overblown. And to that point, Chomsky had a good comment recently when he said in all the coverage of Wikileaks, there's been absolutely no reporting of the findings that cancer rates have sky-rocketed in the Iraqi cities where we dropped depleted Uranium missles. (I think he said there hadn't yet been a single mention of this in the mainstream media).
So it is definitely possible to make too much of this, while ignoring the more obvious injustices that are right under are noses.
But I still think there's value in wikileaks putting it officially out in the open and on the public record, even if it just confirms a lot of what we suspected all along