A Necessary Mea Culpa on Wikileaks

I got it wrong in 2011.

I came of age politically in the context of the Iraq War: when the invasion happened I was 10, in the fifth grade, obsessed with military history, and thoroughly convinced that the decision by George W. Bush & Co. to invade Iraq was stupid. More than anything else, the Iraq War was marked by a turn towards secrecy and obfuscation by the Bush Administration: thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by cluster bombing of major cities became “collateral damage”; mass-looting of Baghdad’s armouries, hospitals, museums, and cultural institutions became “stuff happens”; stories of massacred civilians, tortured inmates, and populations brutalized by unaccountable mercenaries were swept under the rug, their perpetrators acquitted or their charges dropped, downgraded, or ignored by opaque military courts. Critics of the Iraq War were smeared, tarred, and feathered by the Administration and its allies in the press (glaring at you, Fox).

For me, the enduring lesson was to be skeptical of the established mainstream of US Foreign Policy, and to celebrate attempts to bring to light a more accurate record of the Coalition’s conduct in Iraq,whether that was Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting of torture and prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, or the Iraq Body Count’s attempt to paint an accurate picture of the civilian cost of war (one far, far higher than admitted by the US Military or Bush Administration), or the efforts of the Chilcot Report to document the manufacturing and outright manipulation of evidence in the leadup to the decision to invade.

So it’s in that context that the first high-profile activities of Wikileaks occurred. In early 2010, the site released video footage of a July 2007 airstrike in Baghdad that killed two Iraqi war correspondents and a dozen bystanders. That same year in October, the site published nearly 400,000 leaked US Army Field Reports, which suggested a significantly higher civilian death toll than what had been publicly reported. It also leaked diplomatic cables from US Embassies that featured particularly candid opinions about other world leaders and governments.

At the time, I defended Wikileaks’s actions — fairly publicly and fairly consistently. I felt that the conduct of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan was something that had been shrouded in a secrecy that had been detrimental to the American body politic, and that those realities deserved to come to light for public consumption. Besides, the document releases were curated by respected newspapers — The Guardian and The New York Times edited, collated, and released reports on what the documents contained.

After the release of State Department cables in 2010, Wikileaks went quiet for a while. After founder Julian Assange threatened leaks about “a large American bank”, the site found most of its avenues for funding cut off by financial sanctions — most of its money now comes in payment via cryptocurrencies, and Wikileaks was an early investor in bitcoin. Assange, meanwhile, holed up in Ecuador’s Embassy to the UK in August 2012, after facing rape charges in Sweden. There was the odd document — the Intellectual Property chapter of an early draft of the TPP, cables from the Saudi diplomatic corps and Syrian government — but the most high-profile leak of the last half-decade (Edward Snowden) was done entirely without Wikileaks’ participation.

In the last two months, Wikileaks has returned — and seemingly descended into madness.

Wikileaks dove back into the headlines last month with the release of emails between members of the Democratic National Committee, hacked by an entity calling itself “Guccifer 2.0” in April and May. The emails were released on the eve of the DNC’s opening, in a move seemingly designed to inflame intraparty tensions between the Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democrat base. The press of both Wikileaks and Julian Assange since has been instructive: Assange indicated in late-July that he sees Donald Trump as a “less dangerous” Presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton (which on its own should be a disqualifying statement) and that the site had “more leaks” pertaining to the DNC and Hillary Clinton that it would strategically time to cause maximum damage to her Presidential campaign. Wikileaks has also openly dabbled in the most absurd of anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, including baseless accusations that the Clintons killed Vince Foster, nonsense insinuations that a murdered DNC staffer was killed over leaks, and Hannity/Giuliani bogus about Hillary Clinton’s health. Wikileaks’ tweets about polling have also begun to look eerily similar to those of Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik, and both the FBI and security experts in the US believe that the DNC hack was the work of hackers either part of, or linked to, Russian intelligence.

The newfound attention has also led press outlets to comb through Wikileaks’ releases from the last year, finding that the site routinely published personal, sensitive information — including the names, passport #s and addresses of rape victims, the identities of gay activists in Saudi Arabia (where homosexuality still carries a literal death sentence), the medical information of diplomats and their families, the personal info and party affiliation of millions of Turkish women (in an era of increased authoritarianism by the Erdogan government). Even some of Wikileaks’ most ardent defenders of old — Glen Greenwald and Edward Snowden foremost among them — have criticized the site’s “aversion to even the most modest data curation.” In the parlance of several security experts, Wikileaks has been “weaponized” by the Russian government — particularly in the context of the American election. Whatever its starting intentions, it’s clear that — for all intents and purposes — that Wikileaks has become a tool of the Kremlin and its allies.

This is a turn worthy of condemnation from all decent corners of politics (my list above didn’t even mention Wikileaks dabbling in alt-right antisemitism), and one that has completely undermined any sense of neutrality or objectivity. And while I still think that there is a clear moral distinction between exposing realistic civilian casualties in an illegally-prosecuted conflict and openly cribbing for a spraytan fascist, the most recent turn also requires some soul-searching on the part of those of us that defended Wikileaks in the early 2010s.

Questions about the site’s objectionable redaction policies (namely: none) aren’t new. They were raised in the State Department and diplomatic cable leaks, when the names of important informants in Afghanistan were unredacted from Wikileaks’ data dump. Though some of their earlier leaks were coordinated with major national newspapers, Assange abandoned that strategy when he found the process “too time-consuming” in favour of indiscriminate dumps of personal information. A lot of us, myself included, brushed those objections aside in 2011, when the dirty laundry of the Bush Administration and its national security apparatus was being aired. But that unwillingness to redact personal information, and Wikileaks’ refusal to abide by even the most basic principles of data curation, was just as damaging in 2011 as it is now. Those of us who welcomed, even cheered, the airing of the Bush Administration’s dirty laundry should have given more credence to those critiques then. It shouldn’t have taken the site’s newfound allegiance with the alt-right and the Kremlin for us to recognize that.

A tweetstorm from soonergrunt on Tuesday sums it up well:

I count myself guilty of overlooking or downplaying those dangers in 2011. I wish I didn’t have to.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.