How WikiLeaks threatens transparency

How WikiLeaks threatens transparency(transcapitalist.com)

23 points by mhil 15 years ago | 17 comments

blueberry 15 years ago |

It sounds nonsense to me to blame Wikileaks for making transparency opponents make more opposed to transparency. When you point out a problem, sometimes the people who don't want this problem to be solved will take even more radical measures to make sure it is kept secret. Giving up because of this is like giving up fighting terrorism because your actions can anger terrorists and they might kill more people. Also it's not clear from the current leaks whether they would have been prevented if there was less transparency between governmental bodies.

barrkel 15 years ago | |

Actually, there's a fairly hefty argument that fighting terrorism motivates and recruits terrorists, bolstering the "us vs them" narrative of terrorist leaders, radicalizes communities, and generally plays into their hands.

Terrorism doesn't work nearly as well if terrorist acts are treated as crimes rather than war offensives. Terrorism works by provoking a reaction out of proportion to the initial attack, which acts as a force multiplier for radicals, who are almost always tiny minorities in whatever country or society ends up being attacked in revenge.

As I understand it, Al Qaida was initially motivated by its opposition to the ruling Saudi family of Arabia, who have a close alliance with the US. By attacking the US with Saudi Arabian terrorists, they hoped to create doubt over that linkage, provoke an extreme reaction, radicalize the Muslim world, and thereby come closer to power.

jacquesm 15 years ago |

Governments have to learn that obscurity is not the same as security just as much as the IT world had to come to terms with it.

You can't 'hide' stuff and assume that it won't come back to bite you any longer. So stuff that you could get away with and sweep under the rug in the past now has the nasty habit of surfacing.

Wikileaks does not threaten transparency at all, it - or its successor - will enable a society that will either simply act more responsible and will deal with living in this new nice glass house or there will be a series of scandals. The genie is as likely to go back in to the bottle as the file sharing one.

The public is getting a rare taste of what their government is up to and so far secret really does seem to equate with 'can't stand the light of day'.

If secret was only 'will hurt our society if known' then wikileaks wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

fleitz 15 years ago |

Those that threaten transparency will threaten it whether wikileaks exists or not. The point of wikileaks is to expose these people and have them removed so they can be replaced by people who are for transparency at which point wikileaks will become irrelevant.

The just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed, wikileaks provides information on what the government is doing so the people may judge whether it is just.

eli 15 years ago | |

I was struck by this line in the June profile in the New Yorker of Julian Assange:

Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...)

mytype 15 years ago | |

This leak doesn't really provide information on what the government is doing. They are low level reports written from the field, largely recognized by people working in this space to be unreliable. The government should certainly be more open about our activities in Afghanistan and the information that drives those actions, but reports like these without context are not the way.

Let's also think about this leak from the perspective of the Afghans and Pakistanis who risk their lives to work with the United States. If we cannot be trusted to protect their identities, then we will end up with far fewer local partners.

GrandMasterBirt 15 years ago | |

There will always be leaks if someone feels that the government is doing something immoral and they have access to the information, even if caught.

I find it insane that it is criminal to share some of this information. Secret information that the government has should be very very little, especially in war efforts. Sure the CURRENT strategy being applied in the battlefield should be secret since that will save our soldiers' lives, but after the battle that should all be revealed.

Hiding information makes the american public hated for certain actions, and the american public does not know what the actions were to begin with, so in the end the american public loses.

Ardit20 15 years ago | | |

There was no leak about the blatant lies that Bush ant Blair were telling about Iraq.

DennisP 15 years ago |

Secret information sharing between government departments is not "transparency."

If the government didn't classify stuff like this in the first place, it could easily share it between departments without worrying about whether it would get leaked or not. That would be transparent.

The information release didn't endanger people. It just endangered policy. If the government would stop doing things that are unpopular and embarrassing, it could stop classifying so much.

Maybe then we'd once again have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."

jackfoxy 15 years ago |

Pfc. Manning's massive leak of low-level classified documents (assuming he is the responsible party, as alleged) was an act of inspired immaturity. He does not have the education or experience to make any sense of the trove of documents, let alone the time to actually read more than a fraction of them, but must have acted either on the assumption "classified equates to bad" or simply an impulse to get away with something.

No adversary is likely to learn anything they didn't already know (and apparently the press has not either), although it potentially gives large well-funded adversaries like Russia and China a great source for drawing case-study training materials.

The damage is to our own intelligence and diplomatic internal affairs, both in scrambling to do damage control and changing procedures.

The material is of great interest to arm chair intelligence analysts; plenty of blogging material.

grandalf 15 years ago | |

I think the leak is of greatest interest to those who have yet to realize that waging a war (even a small war in a third world country that most Americans happily ignore) takes a tremendous amount of ongoing promotion and propaganda.

Obama has been caught in the act of going to great lengths to manage public perception of the war... in this case by hiding information from the public that might result in public pressure to stop the war.

mhil 15 years ago |

The argument is not that WikiLeaks should stop what they are doing because of this collateral damage, but that we should recognize what the most likely immediate impact will be to this revelation: less information sharing. A leak of some sort would not have been prevented with less transparency between governmental bodies, but now State can say that if their classified data was kept internal this particular info would not have been released. If staff from one department leak information from another department it only reinforces distrust between agencies and slows down the progress towards openness within government.

jeremymims 15 years ago |

"Our success in Afghanistan depends on open information sharing."

We've had 100,000 troops chasing 500 key people for nearly a decade. I'd say we already lost the most expensive game of hide-and-seek ever...

schmichael 15 years ago |

This article threatens our intelligence.

mustpax 15 years ago | |

While I laughed at your joke and agree with your sentiment, I had to vote you down because witty one-liners introduce more snark than insight and drive the quality of discussion on HN down.

schmichael 15 years ago | | |

Agreed. Sorry for the noise.