There’s been a lot of people here on this site singing the praises of Wikileaks, with one recent recommended diary comparing Julian Assange to Daniel Ellsburg, and Wikileaks document dumps to The Pentagon Papers. I’m here to make the case that such support is misguided, and does the cause of transparency a disservice.
A little background: I’m a huge advocate of transparency and government, and have been very disappointed in how the Obama administration has shamelessly used Bush Administration precedents to argue for greater government secrecy, particularly regarding torture and other misdeeds from the Iraq war. True whistleblowing is needed now more than ever to hold governments accountable for their actions and to have people realize that extreme measures in ‘The War on Terror’ have a huge human cost.
That being said, Wikileaks is truly a terrible champion of this badly needed fresh air in government. Wikileaks and Assange is not an organization that looks at documents for corruption and misdeeds that need revealing. Wikileaks is an organization that reveals just about EVERYTHING it gets its hands on, with no regard for the actual human impact of what it is doing. It isn’t weighing the moral consequences of actions; it’s simply the concept of openness taken to an absurd extreme.
Revealing what U.S. diplomats are saying about other countries is not making the world a better place, in the same way revealing every random secret in the world would sow mistrust, not peace. The net result isn’t going to be more openness, it will actually be a more closed and paranoid government that will take new measures to make sure its inner workings are hidden from the public. Assange knows this and doesn’t care – his purpose isn’t to make the U.S. government or any other government better; it’s more anarchist than that – reveal everything about everybody, no matter the cost.
It’s easy to support a muckraker in times like these, and be filled with justifiable anger at the secret outrages of our government. But Wikileaks isn’t the answer – complete exposure of all of the communications of our institutions doesn’t necessarily make them stronger. Exposure of corruption does. There’s a difference, but it’s not one that Wikileaks is responsible for.
To quote the Economist’s Democracy in America blog,
What could be better than giving every human being on the planet the capacity to subvert all established authorities and institutions, private or public, tyrannical or meritocratic? What would be better, I submit, is lucid self-awareness about how much our liberty depends on the existence of stable, functioning institutions to protect it against those who long to extinguish it in the name of sundry anti-liberal theological and ideological projects.
I have no illusions that my view or this diary will have any popularity in this community, which more concerned with the abuses of our government than it is with considering the problems with complete disclosure of information. But I invite people to consider that unlimited release of information is not going to improve our government; it won't improve relations between nations; and it won't make future abuses less likely to occur. By having Wikileaks to become the bad guy, the cause of transparency is now put into a bad light.