I’ll start with a personal comment. I honestly despise Julian Assange. Now, I realize he is just the face of the whole operation, but that doesn’t change how I feel about him. And if charges stick for his sexual transgressions, I’ll despise him even more.
But back to WikiLeaks and the impact on the U.S government and our foreign policy. The first thing that WikiLeaks gained notoriety for was the releasing of “Collateral Murder”. After seeing this I was baffled as to what WikiLeaks’ founders thought they were proving. In fact, I had an argument with a French colleague about the contents of the video. For those who haven’t seen the video and do not have the time, I’ll give a brief summary. A helicopter gunship spots a group of men with what appear to be weapons in their hands. The pilots ask up the chain of command whether they have authorization to fire upon the “hostiles”. They receive authorization, fire on the men and kill all, but one. The wounded man is crawling away when a van pulls up to rescue him. Presuming the van is full of hostile insurgents, the gunship receives permission to fire, which kills a further group of people. When ground troops arrive on the scene they find that the men were holding cameras and children were wounded. They can be seen hurriedly taking the wounded children to receive medical attention.
In the course of the video one can clearly hear the soldiers saying rather distasteful things, but this is neither surprising nor scandalous. Are people so naïve to believe that soldiers do not talk poorly toward those they believe have been shooting at them and their friends? The video shows a tragic, but unavoidable part of any war. To claim otherwise is to really make a mountain out of a molehill.
Moving on to the leak of military diaries in Afghanistan and Iraq; hundreds of thousands of documents have been posted by WikiLeaks that contain information detrimental to service members and informants alike. Perhaps some names have been omitted, but anecdotal evidence, locations, and dates make finding names very easy.
The release of diplomatic cables was the most recent affront to the U.S government and people. I’d like to sum up my thoughts with a few quotes from various articles.
From The Economist “Democracy in America” columnist:
“Diplomatic cables are something entirely different. It's part of the nature of human communication that one doesn't always say the same thing to every audience. There are perfectly good reasons why you don't always tell the same story to your boss as you do to your spouse. There are things Washington needs to tell Riyadh to explain what it's just told Jerusalem and things Washington needs to tell Jerusalem to explain what it's just told Riyadh, and these cables shouldn't be crossed. There's nothing wrong with this. It's inevitable. And it wouldn't make the world a better place if Washington were unable to say anything to Jerusalem without its being heard by Riyadh, any more than it would if you were unable to tell your spouse anything without its being heard by your boss.
At this point, what WikiLeaks is doing seems like tattling: telling Sally what Billy said to Jane. It's sometimes possible that Sally really ought to know what Billy said to Jane, if Billy were engaged in some morally culpable deception. But in general, we frown on gossips."
And another from the same blog:
“But could we please pause for a moment amidst all of our technological triumphalism to reflect on the potential downside to all of this antinomian empowerment of the individual? The libertarian imagination, amply furnished with metaphors of invisible hands and spontaneously generated order, is thrilled by such technological empowerment. 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.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I realize that the modern era will make it impossible to restrict all form of leaks. It used to take hundreds of pieces of paper and a lot of time to reveal government secrets, while anyone with knowledge of a computer and a USB-drive can now do it in a fraction of the time.
As much as I am wary of such self-righteous movements, I believe there is a “bad way” of providing all these documents and a “worse way”. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a certain amount of transparency in the diplomatic relations business, but the manner one goes about “uncovering” truths is important. It would be one thing for Assange and company to have supplied media outlets with all the information (the “bad way”). It is quite another to display the documents for everyone to see if it may endanger people’s lives and diplomatic relations (the “worse way”). I’m glad the leaks showed most U.S government officials in a good light, but that doesn’t change the fact that we may never know how many lives WikiLeaks has ruined. Not only the direct deaths and/or losses of jobs, but the indirect damage caused when informants are scared to indulge information. Hopefully it will not be many, but I can’t keep my fingers crossed…
(Links credit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ , http://www.nytimes.com/ , http://www.economist.com/ , www.theatlantic.com )
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