It’s a roller-coaster ride, is it not? The latest Wikileaks story is as exhilarating as it is big.
That, at least, was my first reaction. I doubt if I was alone.
Thrillingly, intoxicatingly, it brought out the latent anarchist in me.
That was on Sunday. By Monday morning I was having second thoughts. On closer examination questions had begun to nag away. And by Tuesday I was having serious doubts.
Wikileaks and its partner newspapers, including the Guardian, were piously claiming that they were being careful about what exactly they were disclosing among the hundreds of thousands of documents, in an attempt to rebut the squeals from myriad governments that intelligence operatives, diplomats, service men and women, foreign informants and even “innocent civilians” could be seriously endangered by the public disclosure of leaked information.
I am a long-time advocate of the right of access to information, but I have argued often enough against the absolutist transparency evangelists that speckle the activist arena.
There are justifiable public-interest grounds for withholding information. Moreover, the right to privacy — to the protection of personal information such as one’s health status and records — has to be balanced carefully.
The rapid growth of data-protection legislation around the world in the past decade has all but matched the exponential rise in the number of access-to-information laws.
These are very real concerns. The problem is that very often information-holders manipulate these grounds for their own purposes: political sensitivity is masked as a national interest or incompetence or malpractice is dressed up as legitimate commercial confidentiality.
Furthermore, often the claims made about the harm that will be done by public disclosure are wildly overstated. So, too, are they likely to be in the case of this tranche of Wikileaks. But the difficulty in accepting the view of newspaper editors and Wikileaks itself is that, whereas governments make choices about what to disclose and what not to disclose they can, at least in theory, be held to account for their choices.
There is no such accountability mechanism in the case of either Wikileaks or the editors.
Thus, not only do the disclosures rudely disobey the niceties of national governmental information-classification systems, they elude the ordinary operating principles and practice of a functioning democracy.
Still, the anarchist perspective is, in the end, not only a far more compelling narrative, but also a symptom not of reckless promiscuity with information, but rather of how the digital era is enabling power relations to be recalibrated, with potentially radical implications.
Take the argument about the harm to diplomatic relations.
Putting aside the absurdly overblown and disingenuous complaints, thanks to the spooks employed alongside the “real” diplomats, every country knows full well what is being said about it by others.
The concern about harm makes sense only on the basis of a purely nation-state, Westphalian view of the world.
In other words, it makes sense only if I, as a working-class Somalian, for example, have very different interests that require protection because I am Somalian and that can be protected only by secret diplomatic relations with the governments of other nationalities.
If, however far-fetched it might seem, I reach the conclusion that, in fact, my interests as a member of the working class are better served through solidarity with fellow working-class people throughout the world, then the need to secretly defend interests through secretly constructed “diplomatic relations” dissipates.
Let me try to end where I began.
Unlike package holidays to Majorca, flights on Ryan Air or Easyjet, pornography, patio gas heaters and Twenty20 cricket, say, all of which have a superficial appeal that is quickly dispelled upon closer examination of the real-world consequences that they entail, Wikileaks’s potential game-changing consequences are substantial.
In short, its upside outweighs any downside. Besides, it is quite simply futile to resist it. Close Wikileaks and someone else will do it.
As the Chinese are discovering with their increasingly forlorn attempts to control the internet, trying to impose state control over information is at best a losing battle.
Pallo Jordan was smart enough to say as much recently in relation to the ANC’s silly Protection of Information Bill.
Meanwhile, an emergent “open government data” movement is a growing libertarian force, jostling now for attention and supremacy alongside the genteel liberal and social-rights advocacy of the access-to-information movement.
Wikileaks is cut from the same ideological cloth. It doesn’t give a damn about the arcane sensibilities of government. That its approach appears to be in step, rather than against, the grain of popular opinion is indicative of how low traditional democratic institutions have fallen in the estimation of many people.
Quite how far the radical character of this perhaps final phase of the information communication technology revolution will take us cannot yet be safely predicted. But, as with the industrial revolution, it is clear that the world will never be the same again and that the potential for good to come of it is as great as the scope for nefarious exploitation.
In spite of the nationalisation of banks in many major developed countries as a response to the economic crisis, a process that appeared to have restored the place of government as a guardian of the public interest, instinctively one feels that Wikileaks is a further nail in the coffin of that relatively recent invention: the nation state.