There are three general lines of thought expressed around the Wikileaks saga. The first is condemnatory. Governments, led by the US, say Julian Assange and his colleagues are risking the lives of others and damaging the effectiveness of international diplomacy in respect of some of the trickiest parts of the world. The second is laudatory; to celebrate freedom of information without reservation – to view the release of sensitive government information as A Good per se. The third is uncertainty. Whisteblowers play an important function in any democratic society, yet it’s hard to see how Wikileaks can be the best judges of what may and what may not be the consequences of the release of particular information. What happens next? I guess I’m in that third category.
Wherever you stand, it seems to me that there’s been too little said so far about what Wikileaks means for the future of official government data classification and management. There’s a host of other questions lurking beneath that too. Like will governments in future choose to accept that people will know a lot more about the sometimes difficult-to-stomach compromises which nevertheless keep citizens safe? And will those citizens accept that the price of these new information flows is that they will need to face up more that before to the moral contradictions and compromises which lie at the core of they way they live? And how will private sector companies behave? For example, Amazon and others have been quick to de-activate their Wikileaks domains, and that’s understandable for the moment. But their reason – that Wikileaks may be breaching copyright - looks very thin. First off, documents produced by government servants are specifically excluded from copyright protection there. Second, and more important, are they ruling out whistleblowing full stop? Of course not. They’re just getting their umbrellas up and breaking their necks looking at everyone else.
The US government chose to give access to sensitive information, via Siprnet, to perhaps millions of government servants. It’s not to condemn the US administration to say that they missed the significance of the digital native. I think everyone administration’s in the same boat, to be honest. This isn’t my original point, it’s my mate Martin’s, about young people joining the army, entering government service, and not just in the US, are through digital media empowered in ways beyond the establishment’s understanding. Their values are still being shaped, often without the compromises required by mortgages, kids, all the other stuff. Maybe they show no respect. Maybe they don’t get enough in. But it is most certainly a two-way street.
Whatever, there’s no way to constrain the Wikileaks phenomenon. Governments know they have to live with it. Things have changed. There’s no point closing a site or trying to go back to paper. That’s just the way it is. I truly hope that people will rise to the challenge – I think they will. It’s not exactly Hobbitland protected by dark Striders. But I tell you this; it’s sometimes close.
In the last few months, via the All Party Group on the Digital Economy, I’ve met a lot of people all governments should speak to about this stuff. So they should.
4 Comments
There will be fewer dark striders now, and some may well be dead already.
Diplomats some of them, following in traditions of secrecy which sometimes keep the world from war.
Amazing that to leak is to add credibility to gossip. Had the USa leaked all this most of those who are Ooooing and Ahhhing would have pointed their fingers at such nonsense.
I hope you manage to convince some that there are striders, Eric, and that the dark lords are after our souls.
Comment by Quietzapple on 05/12/2010 at 11:18 pmHi, mate. Be nice to have coffee soon? All true and perceptive as ever. Food for my thought, I tell you. I was taught, once, that gossip should be treated as low-level, unprocessed, potential intelligence.
Comment by ericjoycemp on 05/12/2010 at 11:41 pmHaving signed the Official Secrets Act three times (as a student postie) I’m still constantly amazed that staff in professional positions feel they can casually break thier employers’ trust (we’re nowhere near being the Third Reich after all). But, it’s a real world and it just takes one ne’er-do-well to want to make a quick fifty or even secretly feel that they changed the world. And the genie is, of course, technically out of the box – as you point out. ‘Twas interesting to hear on last week’s Pienaar podcast that most post-FoI Washington movers don’t do anything off-the-record on paper any more (let alone in electronic form) and they exist is a world of “yellow stickies” (I think he meant Post-It notes)…
Comment by MekQuarrie on 06/12/2010 at 12:17 amYep, there’ll always be ‘coping’ behaviours and sometimes that’ll mean that there’s a public perception of greater transparency but actually things are more opaque as a lot of the stuff isn’t being written down.
Comment by ericjoycemp on 07/12/2010 at 10:35 am