Getting Used to Wikileaks

A month ago, I had to explain what Wikileaks was when I talked about my philosophy thesis - now everyone has an opinion. I had decided to call the paper "Indecent Disclosure: the Ethics of Wikileaks". At first it was kind of a joke, "indecent" wasn't really the right word, I just wanted to allude to the sudden nakedness of the US government after of the disclosures of the Afghan and Iraq War Logs. Now, though, it seems my joke is getting around in the form of a snappy quid pro quo: Wikileaks does to the American government what TSA does to American citizens. Indeed, the timing couldn't be more ironic - at the very moment when the government has decided to stretch the 4th Amendment beyond recognition - that is, the American freedom from warrantless search - the government finds itself violated, intruded upon, and angry. However, let's not overestimate our own importance: the leak of diplomatic cables isn't really about us - it's about everyone else. Here's a quick rundown of what we learned about our relationships with the rest of the world: 1.) China isn't really behind North Korea anymore; 2.) the Saudis fear Iran just like everyone else; 3.) Hillary Clinton has instructed diplomats to spy on UN ambassadors and gather their personal information; 4.) the Obama administration has used Guantanamo detainees as bargaining chips in diplomatic negotiations in an attempt to outsource torture.

The reason I chose to devote my philosophy thesis - which could have been about almost anything arguable - to Wikileaks, is that Julian Assange is not only the man of the hour, he's the man of our generation. One day, history books will recount the day of Wikileaks' inception just four years ago as the day the internet began to enable the mass disclosure of state secrets. True, the prediction that the internet might someday come to undermine state sovereignty as new international alliances were formed has been something of a bromide since the mid-nineties, but I don't think many people realized how soon it might happen. 

This position outside national politics might tempt us to say that Wikileaks has embarked on an anti-state crusade. However, this is to consider only a very limited picture of what's going on here. One of the most interesting facets of the ethics of Wikileaks is that its actions can be condoned from anarchist, democratic, or simply cosmopolitan positions. Calling Wikileaks anti-state or anti-American might be tantamount to calling Luther anti-Christian: not all criticism of a country involves an antagonism to its foundational ideas or its present legal structure. Indeed, when Amazon decided to drop Wikileaks from its cloud hosting service earlier this week, Wikileaks tweeted "If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books." Wikileaks' very existence depends on the various press freedoms of certain countries, including our own First Amendment and US Supreme Court decisions protecting the anonymity of political speech. For the sake of argument, let's take the Hobbesian tack and say that no rights should be allowed to contribute to the material harm or destruction of the state which secures those rights. In that case, anyone seeking protection under the First Amendment would have to be able to say that their actions do not harm or destroy the state. Can Wikileaks say this? While Assange has been accused of giving the Taliban a hit-list of autochthonous informants, the Pentagon readily admits that it hasn't seen any fallout from the disclosure of the Afghan or Iraq War Logs. This new leak of diplomatic cables may be another story. While foreign governments may choose to disavow the contents of the cables - amusingly, Ahmadinejad has saved the Saudis the trouble by calling the cables an American ruse - our domestic politicians will do no such thing. Americans know the cables are real, so pretending they aren't will only generate further ire. The Obama administration, particularly Hillary Clinton, has lost face, but does this endanger national security? Probably not. This stuff is not the Zimmerman Telegram - it's mostly gossip. It's been about a week since the leak, and no countries have threatened to sever diplomatic relations with or declared war on the US. Not a single official has resigned their position. Our diplomats are just a little red in the face. 

Once more, for the sake of argument, let's accept this assessment: doesn't this beg the question of the raison d'être of Wikileaks? Anyone who's monetarily contributed the organization is probably wondering why they bought into the international rumor mill. Granted, the revelations about outsourcing torture and spying on diplomats are ethically relevant, but what about the other 99% of the information on the Wikileaks party line? The aspiration to total transparency may offer a possible explanation, but this is, at least from a utilitarian viewpoint, a double-edged sword. Too much secrecy breeds corruption, but too much transparency sabotages the kind of quiet diplomacy needed to bring about such important agreements as the lend-lease program of WWII, Nixon's opening of China, or the Camp David Accords. While this latest disclosure hasn't provoked an outright war yet, it may have jeopardized future diplomatic strides toward peace. Now that would be indecent.

This said, the elimination of Wikileaks, even if successful, will not stop the disclosure of state secrets via the internet. Bradley Manning will go down in history as a dumbass, but it didn't have to be that way. Any one of the 3 million people with access to those diplomatic cables and a public computer could have made the same disclosures, even if Wikileaks didn't exist. (Congratulations NSA! You've tracked the leak to a coffee shop in Cincinnati.) As Watergate demonstrated, news organizations don't mind anonymous sources, and the internet is great for disseminating documents very quickly. Even more importantly, the US government does not have the power, either legally or practically, to "shut down" the internet - it doesn't work like that. Servers across the world host their own websites and mirrors of other websites - you'd literally have to go house to house or cut off all telecommunications through internet service providers (Comcast, NetZero, Verizon, etc.), resulting in massive disruption of our infrastructure. Remember when that hacker "took down" Wikileaks last week? None of the mirrors were affected, and Wikileaks simply shifted to Amazon cloud servers. Access to the site was hardly interrupted. When Amazon decided to terminate its hosting of Wikileaks a few days after the attack, Wikileaks took its business elsewhere - and there's always somewhere - and at the time of this writing it is once against available from the US. There were whistleblowing websites before Wikileaks and there will be whistleblowing websites after Wikileaks is gone. Trying Julian Assange for espionage or as an accessory to espionage (someone should tell Sarah Palin that only Americans can be charged with "treason"), or classifying Wikileaks as a terrorist organization à la Rep. Peter King, would not only redefine the legal terms "espionage" and "terrorism", it would not solve the problem which the expansion of the internet has created for governments. Even though Wikileaks is technically blocked in China, Chinese users can still access the site through code-names and proxies. Peter King and Hillary Clinton can go ahead and destroy or censor Wikileaks, but they should remember that this incarnation of internet whistleblowers has offered to work with them prior to all disclosures to purge potentially harmful information - Wikileaks 2.0 may not.