I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about WikiLeaks, and I figure I’d add my $0.02CAN to the maelstrom of debate. These sorts of debates are good for us, they help us keep tabs on public opinion, watch the various interested parties scramble to spin their point of view, and how much their spin can manipulate the common man’s opinion.
The issue, ultimately, is that we have a resource offering to reveal classified information because it’s important from a transparent good government standpoint that they do not hide from us. But the other side of the equation is that the leaker’s identity is kept anonymous, never actually known by WikiLeaks.
Frankly, I’m of two minds on the topic, which comes as no surprise to me. Being a computer nerd has taught me that just about any innovation we come up with will have its good side and its bad side. The internet, for example, gives us a tremendous access to knowledge and information that no generation has ever had so readily available, but also provides any number of negative services, from the easy dissemination of child pornography to the Americanization of the globe.
The US government, of course, is presenting the view that disseminating this information is an act of terrorism, and damn near an act of treason. It insists that it must have at least some air of secrecy in order to protect the people, like when Dad doesn’t tell you that he lost his job and the family’s coasting on fumes. And to a large degree, they’re right. Governments functioning on the international scale have got a different set of perspectives and priorities than you and I do. It’s the macro and the micro; the pressures, procedures, and implications of a global decision are completely different than those on a personal level.
As well, there’s the question of context. You get a document and you read it and interpret it, but you’re interpreting it based on your own knowledge, your own bias, and your own understanding of how it fits into the whole. This can be dangerous and entirely misleading. Most Americans find what happened at Abu Ghraib deplorable, yet they think Jack Bauer’s the best man in times of crisis. In the context of the show 24, they can totally understand his need to work outside the boundaries of common decency and law. Context is everything.
And then there’s the question of, for want of a better term, peer review. How can we ever be certain that the documents we are seeing are valid? One of the first things I always say to people when they present me with something for my consideration is that they must consider the source. WikiLeaks does not give us that capacity. What would prevent it from becoming a tool for disseminating misinformation?
However, those are the cons. The pros are powerful too. If you read the About Us page on WikiLeaks, you get an idea of what it is they are attempting to do. We know instinctively at this point that power corrupts, corruption festers, and for any of our countries to truly work for the people, we have to have checks and balances on the elected and appointed few who make the decisions. What WikiLeaks is doing is not new, just new technology. Exposing the corruption of governments and corporations is integral to being able to trust them to actually fulfill their roles. Believing they are being straight with us, or even that when they lie it’s for our own good is a dangerous ploy.
The media, once upon a time, actively filled the role of the fourth estate, but those days are long gone. Today’s media is tied inexorably to the teat of government and business. You may blame budget cuts all you like, I personally blame those who run the media. They no longer investigate, they wait like lapdogs at the foot of the throne for morsels from the king. They do not act with autonomy, and as such they have violated the trust of their position. In his book Watching The Watchdog: Bloogers As The Fifth Estate, Stephen D. Cooper argues that the role of bloggers as a means to apply those checks and balances to the media. WikiLeaks is, at least in some ways, an extension to that.
WikiLeaks is a good thing. We have this system of checks and balances strictly because we know that we cannot make the mistake of trusting governments implicitly. Someone has to keep the four estates honest. We cannot implicitly trust them any more than we can trust any other agency, but we need transparent government. We need to know what is being done in our name, and they just aren’t telling us.
Jim