Housekeeping, and Informal Thoughts on Wikileaks

Apologies to all the readers for the extended hiatus in new posting; I've been working on securing two new temporary contributors, and taking a short vacation from blogging, as politics season had taken a short break period after the frantic pace of the pre-election information. But we're well moving into the short Lame Duck session of Congress and there's a lot to talk about. So here I am again, humbly at your service!

I also want to thank the many dedicated readers for their interest in P.L. vs:; thanks to you we had over 300(!) individual page views in the month of November, averaging more than 10 pageviews per day. Keep up the reading, and in return I'll try to keep us growing with more fresh insights and general political news!

But for now, to get things rolling, I feel compelled to comment on the Wikileaks controversy that is swirling amongst the political sphere.


As you all probably know, Wikileaks is the controversial site which has been, well, leaking, here and there, confidential government information and classified military documents. At the moment, it's been dropped from all US servers and is now temporarily operating out of the one country which never takes a side- (you guessed it!) Switzerland, with the generous help of the Swiss Pirate Party. On a side note, the world wide Pirate Party phenomenon is an interesting read, and yes it is a real thing; start here if you want to know more. Oh, it's all so fun!

Anyway, the Wikileaks site can now be accessed at Wikileaks.cn, or the specific IP address: http://213.251.145.96/. The reason for it's drop has to do with a combination of it's hyper controversial nature and vigilante cyber attacks in the nature of DDoS and DoS which have periodically shut down the site.

It's really not surprising that Wikileaks has come under such attack. The non-profit organization has released documents not intended for release on a scale that has never been done before, including documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and international governments are still trying to cope with the fallout from the most recent release: 250,000 individual US diplomatic cables (conversations between diplomats and officials). Some Republicans have been calling for Wikileaks to be designated a terrorist organization for its release of these documents that could potentially put active diplomats and armed service members in harms way. And most Democrats and virtually the rest of the Republicans favor taking serious legal action against Wikileaks or it's founder Julian Assange, if nothing else, simply on the basis of the embarrassment to world leaders and the US government, and the dysfunction, disruption, and international mistrust it has supposedly caused. We could be talking about a charge on the level of treason, or something relative in nature to that charge. Of course, complicating things on the legal front is the First Amendment of the Constitution, the fact the Assange is an Australian citizen, the fact that Assange seems to be hiding out somewhere in the UK, the fact that the servers of Wikileaks are operating out of France and Sweden, or the fact that the domain name is now hosted in Switzerland. Also logistically complicating the removal of Wikileaks servers is that, well, they're in a bomb shelter... bunker... cave. I'm just saying, these Wikileaks guys are ready for anything.

No, wait, it gets better. Assange is now wanted by Interpol; oh yes there he is up on the site, for an alleged sex crime or two in Sweden. The timing of the release of this notice by Interpol is certainly convenient for the United States and many countries of the world which would love to see Assange behind bars. Again, whether or not these sex crime allegations are related to Wikileaks or not is unclear, but the timing of the Red Notice put out by Interpol is suspicious, to say the least. 


Most political commentators have leveled varying degrees of condemnation at Assange, most of whom have echoed what Secretary of State Clinton said Monday at the beginning of this week: "The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems." A few bold souls have actually praised the release of these documents, and Clinton addresses these people in the same speech to which I linked above. Her argument against this praise comes at 4:45 in the youtube video. Clinton essentially argues that state diplomacy requires exceptional discretion for it to be effective. A similar argument is made in this article by Paul Schroeder, shared with me by a friend.

My initial reaction to the whole thing was guarded praise for the release of these documents, since I am always in favor of more transparency in our governmental systems. Public servants, in some ways, lose the privilege of privacy when they represent a collective body of citizens, and unless those citizens can make informed decisions about what is going on in their world, not just what the officials want us to know, but what is actually happening, the better we can elect leaders who can carry out the kind of diplomacy in which we believe. The more I have thought about this issue, the more my position has become solidified, again with cautious praise for the Wikileaks release. There are some caveats to this praise however. To address it, I recommend you read the Schroeder article above and then my response to it, which is below.


The article's comments, which surmise most of the major criticisms of Wikileaks, are ultimately not convincing to me. I'm unsatisfied with the explanation that secrecy is necessary, for the sake of secrecy, when secrecy is all we've had. In other words, the argument that states require secret diplomacy to run correctly and effectively may be true, but this argument ignores the question of whether or not the fact that this secrecy is necessary is actually a good thing! It seems to me that secrecy in the public service often has a dubious foundation. Perhaps if we stop treating the public like children unable to professionally analyze the data released in massive leaks, or confidential material in general, the public will become used to such otherwise 'scandalous' materials and use the information to be better knowledgeable about our world's foreign relations situation. As I said earlier, this information can be used in advocacy or in the ballot box.

Meanwhile, the argument that other foreign leaders would be insulted by the information coming out, and it therefore hurts the relations between the US and other countries requires additional questions be asked. I have a hard time believing that foreign leaders are so naiive that they don't already know how our diplomats and foreign officials feel about them, and either way I don't think that the leader of a nation would honestly be so self conscious as to care about what US diplomats or officials think. But the embarrassment really comes from the fact that now the public knows of the humiliation they've received in confidential cables, and it may hurt the pride of these leaders. Well, if public humiliation makes these people more aware of their own shortcomings (both the giver and receiver of the insult) then I am in favor of it.

From my standpoint, these diplomats and foreign officials are a product a concept of prestige based on the power (military of economic) they are representing, of the country from which they come, and that prestige is based upon our unnecessary sociological and cognitive retention of the proud nation state in our world understanding. It doesn't surprise me that the establishment within the government in both parties are condemning the release of these documents, because they lower the prestige of the socially constructed entity for which they work. Power and prestige aren't ideological issues or party issues so why disagree? I have written at length of the major problems in assuming that the nation state is the best or only form of governance, and I think everyone would be a little better off if they remembered that institutions such as the nation (and this includes the officials whose jobs depend on representing that nation) exist only as long as the people continue to tolerate the socialized existence of such things. If leaks of this sort expose the nation-state for the inadequate governing system that it is, then I approve. And I'll reiterate that the cables at the very least raise the question of whether or not it is a good thing that secrecy is required for the system to work in the first place. What, exactly, is preventing our nations from working with complete transparency? And why?

And still, through all of this, I have some major reservations regarding an outright endorsement of the activities by Wikileaks. The final argument made by critics of the organization, to which I am much more amenable, is this: that there is sometimes a time and a place for the release of confidential documents, and that releasing documents without discretion in a huge 'dump' is perhaps ill-advised, particularly as it puts in danger individuals who are trying to anonymously or confidentially warn US officials about anything from genocide to asymmetrical political violence, to discrete forms of oppression. Perhaps Wikileaks should have taken a fine tooth comb through these documents, using a professional who could evaluate them, and blacked out the names of people who might be put in serious actionable danger from the release of these documents. No nuclear wars are about to be started because of these documents that Wikileaks released (and the pride of nations deserves to be checked every once in awhile), but I'm sure the US does possess documents which might provoke a major regional conflict or even a world war, and I think that these kinds of documents should be handled with utmost care.

And yet the major problem with the above suggestion for an approach is that the people best qualified to help Wikileaks determine the difference between information that is seriously and immediately dangerous and information which would just hurt the pride of national figures, are US Government officials. It's unclear that the US Government would have cooperated with Wikileaks in an honest way, or even at all, and it's also unclear that Wikileaks wouldn't have somewhat compromised the press power of the 'document dump' by warning the US of what the organization possessed. But I think it's about time that Wikileaks showed it's commitment to the careful release of documents and proved that the organization is not just dumping these documents for the sake of media attention and controversy. They could do this by reaching out to the US Government and requesting cooperation on subsequent releases.

This is what I meant earlier by cautious praise. I like the general idea of what Wikileaks is trying to accomplish through transparency, revealing the kinks in the system and shedding light on that which the US Government, for reasons of pride (or maybe shame), wants to keep in the dark. But just releasing confidential documents without any discretion seems irresponsible to me as well, and in the future I would ask more from Wikileaks in terms of the acknowledgment of the dangerous potential that the release of some documents may pose. It's very hard to know where, exactly, to draw the line between what is responsible and irresponsible in these situations, but instead of just outright condemnation of Assange and Wikileaks from commentators, I want to hear more of where to draw this line, and why. In the end, anything that provokes discussion of the merits of our current system should be given some praise; methods of provocation, however, might be reasonably and fairly subject to a little condemnation as well.

I want to end by saying that I am NOT a foreign policy expert, and I am ignorant of many aspects which may be present in a larger and more complex argument. Therefore I am very open to additional arguments going both ways in this discussion. What do you think?