Leaking Confidential Information Does Not Promote Transparency
Wikileaks claims that the basis of their work is Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights arguing that civil rights require expression and receipt of information rights without boundaries. However, leaking US diplomatic cables content made civil rights organizations reconsider their previous positive stand on WikiLeaks, which is notable because of WikiLeaks’s belief that their work is through the agency of civil rights. Wikileaks is not an effective method of exposing information transparency because these disclosures put lives at risk and successful aspects of political structures are built on the same ambiguity of information that leads to corruption.
WikiLeaks’s public disclosures put lives at risk. However, many fail to think about risk assessment. On an individual level, this mindset creates the fallacy that they will not be the ones that are harmed because ‘Despite the high odds, it could never happen to me’. Instead, others will be negatively affected, displaying a lack of thought regarding the affordances resulting from large scale information leaks. This is a common problem between digital activism and WikiLeaks which are believed by many to be the same thing. Foucault Welles proposes that digital movements depend on how dedicated a few powerful companies are to defending free speech, despite immense pressure from national governments. This is true of the executives of WikiLeaks especially in the context of the Iraq War Logs and Afghan War Diary leaks. These leaks caused widespread panic amongst government officials, not because they were being exposed, but because they worried that public access to this information would put a lot of lives at risk. The Afghan War Diary is one of the, if not the most, important leaks that led to WikiLeaks’s loss of support because they were accused of revealing hundreds of identities of people who were involved with the Afghan coalition which put them at risk. Systems like the Witness Protection Program exist to protect informants from individuals who would harm them for testifying and information is classified for large scale disasters like the Afghan War for the same purpose.
WikiLeaks is comparable to newspapers around the world because of the tendency for both to publish classified information without authorization. One of the most common issues in the journalism field is the hypocrisy that over-ambitiousness creates in journalists. Many journalists relentlessly chase after stories showing no remorse for how the informants that are involved will be affected. The angle that journalists curate to make their story front page news often has destructive consequences especially for individuals that are quoted directly and have their names tied to the story. Much like Nick Sidor’s experience in “Arrested Development”, once someone’s name is tied to something controversial it takes years to scrub a digital footprint clean. Especially in the context of something as high profile as WikiLeaks, one can imagine how detrimental it would be to have a name tied to the site. If there was no way for people contributing to stories in the media to keep their name off the record, it would be impossible to have stories in the first place! Witnesses would not testify for crucial criminal cases, people would fear to describe suspicious activity they have seen around their neighborhood, and no one would report and identify abusers if there was no way to keep their information confidential. Losing a right to protect sources would lead to extreme transparency, but this would not create a truer form of democracy or a more civil society. It is very unrealistic and naive to expect the government to be completely transparent about their sources and dialogue because the government exists to make the best decision for the country as a whole. This is a nearly impossible task in the first place, however, the political divide continues to grow wider annually. So, creating a huge glass window into the inner workings of government decisions would not create a more united course of action to solve issues. Instead, it would emulate the metaphor of ‘having too many cooks in the kitchen’ and make it infinitely more difficult to make progress as a society by expanding every issue into an unnecessary debate amongst people that have no control over the problem at hand.
The publication of such information can also undermine national security and international stability, as it can lead to the release of sensitive information that could be used by hostile actors to further their own interests. Another ethical concern relates to the right to privacy and confidentiality. The information published by WikiLeaks often contains private and sensitive information about individuals, including their personal and financial details. The publication of such information can have significant consequences for the privacy and security of individuals, as it can expose them to potential harm and exploitation. This raises important questions about the ethical implications of publishing confidential information, particularly when it concerns the privacy of individuals who are not in a position to consent to the release of their information. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere stated that “Confidentiality and transparency are not mutually exclusive, but rather two sides of the same coin.” (“Spiegel Interview with German Interior Minister: ‘Wikileaks Is Annoying, but Not a Threat’.”) People in support of WikiLeaks suggest that the exposure of the government will hold them more accountable and encourage more transparency in different diplomatic areas. However, Schmidt (2007) introduced the concept of social affordance, “capturing the way networks of relations enable and constrain
technological capacities.” (“Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse — Sage Journals.”) There are certainly instances that could have been solved by having the government under a magnifying glass, but it is important to recognize that simply leaking classified documents to the general public is a very extremist method of motivating change and there is a better way to achieve the same goal through a more middle ground approach rather than WikiLeaks or nothing. Another severe downfall of WikiLeaks’s methods is the fact that it is extremely difficult to judge how important the data set is. In cases like the diplomatic cables leak, such a large amount of diplomatic cables became publicly available. On November 28th 2010, WikiLeaks started releasing US State Department diplomatic cables. The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and El Pais in coordination with WikiLeaks published the first articles which revealed that over 250,000 confidential documents had been leaked to WikiLeaks. During the same night the first 219 documents of the diplomatic cables were published on the WikiLeaks site. According to WikiLeaks, all cables were to be published during the coming months. By December of 2010, more than 800 cables had been published. To leak thousands of pages of documents and expect the general public to come to one consensus about the main ideas of the issue is impossible. People see and hear what they want to, and as a result it is not productive for people to have access to a confidential issue so they can skim certain paragraphs and hyper-fixate on elements of the cables that are irrelevant.
Ultimately, it is very probable that WikiLeaks will have the complete opposite effect than intended, meaning an increase in government restrictions and Internet censorship. Stephen Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy stated “ . . . And above all, it has launched a sweeping attack not simply on corruption, but on secrecy itself. And I think that’s both a strategic and a tactical error. It’s a strategic error because some secrecy is perfectly legitimate and desirable. It’s a tactical error because it has unleashed a furious response from the US government and other governments that I fear is likely to harm the interests of a lot of people besides WikiLeaks who are concerned with open government. It may become harder to support protection for people who disclose and publish classified information after WikiLeaks.” (“Is WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a Hero? Glenn Greenwald Debates Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News”) WikiLeaks has already been the target of denial-of-service attacks following their publication of diplomatic cables in November 2010 that exposed sensitive government issues on a global scale. So, there have already been evident signals pointing to firmer legislation and increased surveillance. There are also multiple bills in progress like the SHIELD Act targeting forces like WikiLeaks and making it illegal to publish names of informants and another aiming to extend US government rights to wiretap. It would be very simple to use WikiLeaks as a case to pass these bills because it has dipped into issues “including access to government information, censorship and the blocking of websites, government secrecy and the over-classification of government information, treatment of whistleblowers, government transparency and the legalities surrounding classified information.” (“What is the effect of WikiLeaks for Freedom of Information?”) Therefore, Wikileaks has a very extreme method of motivating information transparency that does not take into account the multitude of reasons why the information they leak is considered confidential and not authorized for public knowledge, so it is more likely to cause stricter restrictions and surveillance to keep these structures in place.
