I’ve been asked over the past week to comment on Wikileaks in the press, primarily to answer the question “is Wikileaks good or bad?” It may seem like a silly way to frame the debate (and I’m grateful to Vikash especially for trying to move the debate forward) but that’s where the media cycle remains. And it’s a fair question for the media to be trying to sort out: the Wikileaks site (currently down) claims that “publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people.” The site’s critics excoriate him for violating the law and putting (variously) national and human security at risk. Some are even branding him a terrorist.
Naturally, I’ve been giving an academic’s answer to this question of Wikileaks’ ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’: it depends.
A Force for Good. Though I seem to have become known as a Wikileaks detractor, I was once quite excited about the organization’s early whistle-blowing work. For example, it exposed corporate dumping of toxic materials off the Africa coast. And it brought to light the apparent shooting of non-combatants by a US helicopter in Baghdad. In such cases, I have argued a platform like Wikileaks serves the public good, while protecting those vulnerable to recrimination. The Geneva Conventions for example, require soldiers to report war crimes they witness, but they provide no mechanism for doing that short of their own chain of command. Whistle-blowing sites like Wikileaks have the potential to fill an important gap in the laws of war.
More Harm Than Good. However this type of targeted activity is not what we have seen in recent months. It is not “whistle-blowing” to simply disseminate private or classified information devoid from any context of wrong-doing. Leaving aside the broader ethical questions of whether, when and how massive document dumps should occur, it seems to me that when they do they probably have the opposite effect as targeted whistle-blowing.
First, they make it very difficult to identify actual cases of wrong-doing within the mass of extraneous data about everyday events they reveal, much of which is unremarkable. In this case, candid off-the-record remarks by diplomats may sell papers, but they do not constitute “wrong-doing.” In fact, as Dan Drezner intimates, hypocrisy and two-faced-ness can be a virtue, not a vice – not only in normal social relations but also among those who govern, and especially in the diplomatic corps. There may well be evidence of specific wrong-doing in these dumps, but if so it’s getting drowned out by a focus on all the fun but meaningless gossip, the foreign policy implications of which are still yet to be determined.
Second, while they may ultimately reveal wrong-doing by some, indiscriminate leaks also make it harder for honest civil servants to go about the business of promoting the public good. As Peter Spiro has pointed out, one of the immediate consequences of this latest leak is likely to be that diplomatic discourse will go increasingly offline. Whereas once information was shared by memo, now frank opinions are likelier to be shared only through verbal communication. This will make it that much more likely that diplomats will misunderstand or misinterpret crucial information.
Ultimately,it will mean something else as well: much less transparency in terms of the ultimate historical record. These cables would have been released to the public eventually after a few decades. If Wikileaks is incentivizing a diplomatic culture in which discretion can only be exercised by avoiding a digital footprint entirely (Rob Farley previously made a similar argument about leaks in the national security sector), then historians and humanity will be all the poorer for it.
How ironic indeed if Wikileaks, champion of “radical transparency,” contributed to a less transparent world by choosing the wrong strategy.
I think this is pretty much spot on. I have nothing against speaking out when it reveals war crimes, but to call dumping 250,000 documents on the internet “whistle-blowing” is just wrong. We have “whistle-blowing” legislation in most democratic countries because it's a last resort when other channels fail. These people are then protected under domestic legislation – and that's absolutely crucial.
I think this is why they're calling it “cablegate” – they want to make it appear that what they are doing IS revealing some kind of big cover up. But, aside from the everyday intrigue of diplomacy, there hasn't been much yet to suggest that there is some kind of scandal. It's a document dump plain and simple, and I think you are absolutely right to suggest that whistle-blowing is valuable AND needed, but this is dangerous.
I was really heavily reliant on the Foreign Relations of the United States papers for my PhD/book. Without this kind of information in the future, academics are in a lot of trouble.
Thanks for the post. It was one of the more thoughtful discussions dissecting in one place the pros and cons of what Wikileaks is doing that I've seen.
You did mention in the introduction the usual claims of benefits and costs that have been discussed in the media. I've read your reactions to the arguments regarding legal issues and national and human security, but I haven't seen your response to the issue of transparency.
Or, rather, you only seem to discuss its cost: it's harder for career diplomats to do their jobs. That is a large cost, but it seems like there are large benefits to consider from the information that a variety of different agents get as a result of fairly banal dumps of government bureaucrats.
At the most abstract level, the more people that are exposed to piece of information, the harder it is for individuals or subsets of agencies to mischaracterize it. Perhaps the Iraq War would not have been averted had there been Wikileaks, but at the very least there probably would have been a very different public discussion of specific claims advanced by the Bush Administration, (aluminum tubes, yellow cake and Niger, Saddam's capabilities, etc.). Even if the Bush Administration had started to adapt to a Wikileaks culture and done more verbal communication, there would still be documents to leak that would provide some insight into what was going on.
Additionally, and more specifically, the more transparent a given government action or plan is, the less likely it can be hidden from other members of the government. To use another Iraq War analogy, had some information been leaked from the Pentagon or Dick Cheney's intelligence shop, it would have given the State Department a better idea of what the majority of them were fighting against. There are additional arguments to be made for the benefits of transparency, but they seem similar to the ones I've outlined.
I've made a number of assumptions, and there are arguments to be made against these positions, but it's not obvious (at least, to me) that they can simply be ignored. They seem to deserve the same amount of consideration that you give your concerns about diplomats being able to do their jobs.
Have you written about the benefits to transparency, or have plans to?
“At the most abstract level, the more people that are exposed to piece of information, the harder it is for individuals or subsets of agencies to mischaracterize it.”
There are reams of research across a number of discplins which would challenge this assumption. Information doesn't speak for itself. Simply having the information in the public domain doesn't lead to it's acceptance or authority, or enable it to change embedded perceptions. The extent to which it becomes more difficult by simply having alternate information in the public sphere is debatable.
While I agree there are obvious benefits to transparency I think in general people assume too much on the positive side without taking into account the practical difficulties of communication and “collective perception”.
Oh, I completely agree. Framing effects, the availability heuristic, interpreting new information through pre-existing ideological and partisan lenses, the list goes on and on.
But the more information that gets released, the harder it is for those effects to obscure the information. The harder it is to ignore. Whatever difficulty with which new information gets processed is an argument in favor of more disclosures of information, not less.
In any event, you reference too many people assuming benefits on the positive side. I'm wondering if Prof. Carpenter has ever referenced those benefits in her writing on the issue.
Yes, but you have the weigh the likelihood that the release of information will lead to a positive change in perception (and we can debate all day whose should make the determination as to what is “positive”) versus the potential direct costs if change doesn't occur and the collateral damage that may occur from the informations' release.
It is a lot more complicated than more information = at worst neutral, at best net positive outcomes. I don't think the relationship is necessary linear; likely more parabolic…
Again, I completely agree. We are in complete agreement.
I don't think anything I wrote can be interpreted as “more information = at worst neutral”. I was pointing out the benefits to more information because I think Prof. Carpenter has focused exclusively on the costs. “[The benefits] seem to deserve the same amount of consideration that you give your concerns about diplomats being able to do their jobs [i.e., the costs]. ” I think it's pretty clear I'm in favor of cost-benefit analysis.
As a sidenote, cost-benefit analysis seems to be the default ethical framework in evaluating Wikileaks' actions. I wonder why there isn't more focus on other frameworks such as utilitarianism; e.g., “Wikileaks should release information that would result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people”.
Thanks for responding. I look forward to reading your thoughts.
The wiki is a fantastic idea, and I think it helps remind people that there's a role for the public to play in establishing norms for Wikileaks' actions. The thought is more fully developed here: https://noompa.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/the-publics-role-in-wikileaks-ethics/