The Biggest Leak

By Bretigne Shaffer
Dec. 18, 2010

So much of the debate over Wikileaks, when not focused on what kind of person Julian Assange is, has been centered around whether or not the leaked information has the potential to cause harm or even cost lives; whether releasing it was a public service or an act of gross irresponsibility. While this is obviously an important question, it misses the entire point of Wikileaks and what it represents by a mile. Likewise, most of the media attention completely overlooks the real significance of what Wikileaks has accomplished in releasing the documents.

The most important piece of information revealed by Wikileaks to date has not been the graphic videos of US soldiers gunning down civilians and two journalists in Iraq nor the US military's systematic cover-up of civilian deaths and prisoner abuse there; nor has it been that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to steal personal data from UN diplomats; nor the news that the Obama administration launched secret missile attacks in Yemen or even the revelations of rampant corruption in Kenya that may have influenced the 2008 general elections there.

The biggest revelation to date is this: When pushed, the US government will behave no differently from any tin-pot dictatorship in the lengths to which it will go to cover up its wrongdoings from the people it ostensibly exists to serve. The illusion that US citizens enjoy freedom of speech or anything resembling government transparency, indeed the very notion that we live under a "government of the people", has been busted wide open. The irony, of course, is that this information did not require any disgruntled government employee to secret it away, in fact it was never really "leaked" at all, but was handed over willingly to the public by the US government itself.

Even more important than this revelation of course, is the technology that has allowed all of the documents Wikileaks has obtained to be made public. For the debate over the goodness or badness of Wikileaks is really about the goodness or badness of genuine transparency and, ultimately, genuine accountability for those in power. What Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has created is a paradigm-shifting model that allows people to in effect spy on their governments, a tool that threatens to change forever the landscape in which the state exists.

Not surprisingly the state has reacted vehemently and in so doing has revealed its true nature. Politicians and commentators have called for Mr. Assange and his sources to be assassinated, Newt Gingrich and others have called him a terrorist, and legislators have proposed changing the law so that Mr. Assange can be prosecuted. Meanwhile, Government officials have successfully pressured companies such as Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and everyDNS.com (and very likely the Swiss postal system) into suspending their services to Wikileaks.

All of this was no accident. In an online Q&A session on December 3, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said,

"Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality."

For those Americans who don't already understand the consequences of the regulatory regime under which businesses operate, the government's ability to pressure private businesses into dropping Wikileaks should make it abundantly clear that businesses operate here only at the whim of the Emperor. Just as the response to the Wikileaks releases has revealed this country's "free speech deficit", so has it called into question the notion that the US is a home for "free-market capitalism". It is this insidious intertwining of government and business that is the foundation for what Mr. Assange refers to as the "privatization of state censorship".

PayPal, MasterCard, Amazon, et al can argue that they had no choice but to drop Wikileaks because their Terms of Service require that account holders not violate laws or encourage others to do so. But whether Wikileaks has done anything illegal or asked anyone else to do anything illegal is a matter of speculation at this point. There have been no formal charges brought against Wikileaks. The bigger question though is what happens when the laws are wrong? What should private businesses and individuals do when the laws themselves violate the rights of Americans, or facilitate government crimes and abuses? This whole episode might just force Americans to confront the distinction between what is legal and what is right.

It may also force us to confront the hypocrisy at the root of our culture that imposes an entirely different moral code on those in authority than is imposed upon the rest of us. We can no longer ignore the gaping chasm that exists between what governments are allowed to do and what ordinary people are allowed to do. For if we are to condemn Wikileaks for potentially, theoretically, endangering the lives of innocent (or even not-so-innocent) people at some unspecified time in the future, then how can we ignore the fact that the government making this claim has itself murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the pursuit of its ends?

Indeed, government officials have revealed themselves to be as averse to the rule of law as they are to freedom of speech. They believe themselves to be free to persecute those who challenge them, unrestrained by the law and without any need for legal justification. And more often than not, they are right. As Glenn Greenwald so succinctly puts it:

"Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them -- all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They've blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange's legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them "Terrorists" even though -- unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things -- neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians...

"The U.S. and its "friends" in the Western and business worlds are more than able and happy to severely punish anyone they want without the slightest basis in "law." That's what the lawless, Wild Western World is: political leaders punishing whomever they want without any limits, certainly without regard to bothersome concepts of "law."

We can no longer pretend that there is any meaningful distinction between the way our government operates and the way those in China, Myanmar or Saudi Arabia do. When threatened, they throw off any pretense of respect for democracy, due process or any part of the legal system that does not serve their immediate ends. If this is indeed what the Wikileaks team intended to reveal, then it should be considered the site's most important leak to date.

Anonymity is revolutionary. Governments have long recognized this. What Wikileaks has done is to give us the ability to in effect spy on government with a powerful assurance of anonymity. It has begun to level the playing field. Now ordinary people can be protected as they work to hold governments accountable for their actions and for their lies. Defending Julian Assange, or even Wikileaks itself, is not the point. The point is that this technology, this ability to spy on governments with some degree of protection, is critical for any semblance of a free society to flourish. And now that Wikileaks has done it, anyone else can too. Even if Wikileaks is destroyed, the model has been demonstrated and other sites will be built to perform the same function. Already, the former deputy to Mr. Assange says that he plans to launch one such site, Openleaks any day now.

Will "bad" people ever use these sites for nefarious ends? Of course they will. Just as bad people use the state for nefarious purposes every day. But let's remember that there is a distinction between actually committing an evil act and providing information that others may use to commit one. Those whose secrets Wikileaks has exposed are guilty of the former, while Wikileaks' complicity even with the latter remains purely hypothetical. There is no evidence that anyone has been harmed because of information released on the site.

Neither releasing information nor suppressing it is inherently good or evil. But there are good reasons for preferring openness over secrecy. Among them is this: Operating in secrecy helps governments to commit crimes ranging from the misappropriation of funds to the outright slaughter of innocent civilians. Breaching the wall of secrecy makes it much more risky to commit such acts, creating a disincentive to engage in them. Anything that leads to a reduction in the kind of criminal behavior the Wikileaks documents have unveiled is a good thing.

Assange is no anarchist. Nor is he even philosophically opposed to war. He has said:

"We have clearly stated motives, but they are not antiwar motives. We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the public, where the press and the public and our nation's politics can work on it to produce better outcomes."

Yet by his very actions -- acting outside of the limits set by government and possibly in violation of its rules -- he is implicitly acknowledging that working within the confines of the system is not sufficient to keep it accountable. He is acknowledging that governments not only cannot be trusted to police themselves, but they cannot even be trusted to set the ground rules under which they will be policed; that we do need competing forces outside of government in order to impose any kind of meaningful checks and balances on it.

This is huge.

Those who argue that governments "need to keep some secrets" ignore the fundamental problem of allowing governments to decide which secrets they get to keep. Does anyone really believe that the US government would have disclosed the Apache video or the fact that it had bombed civilians in Yemen, blaming the act on the Yemeni government, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests? (Indeed, Reuters reporters had been trying since 2007 to obtain the Apache video through FOIA requests). Government cannot be its own watchdog. As long as government officials get to decide what information gets released and what is secret, they will always conceal its crimes and its lies.

Wikileaks is in fact busting the monopoly not only on information but on the law as it relates to information, and on who gets to decide what that law is. Whether Mr. Assange chooses to acknowledge it or not, Wikileaks challenges the legitimacy of the monopoly state itself by the act of establishing a real-world check on it -- not to one government in one country, but to all governments everywhere. Wikileaks has shown that government monopoly on information must be subverted if there is to be genuine transparency and any hope of accountability. And if this is true for information, in what other areas might it also be true?

The significance of Wikileaks is not to be measured by the value of the information it has released, or by the legitimacy of releasing it. Nor is it a function of the integrity, or lack thereof, of Mr. Assange or those working with him. Whether Wikileaks is a force for good or for evil is a function of its potential to offer up a real challenge to government control of information and by extension to governments' power over the lives of ordinary people.
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Bretigne Shaffer is a writer and filmmaker, and author of "Why Mommy Loves the State." Visit her website here.