1 January 2011
1 January 2011: Shirky has some further thoughts on Wikileaks.
7 December 2010: Clay Shirky has a nice piece on Wikileaks that conveniently dovetails nicely with my opinions on the subject. I also point you to an interview on KQED radio in San Francisco with two veteran diplomats, Richard Haas and Joseph Nye. (The interview is about half an hour, but well worth the time if you’re interested in the topic.)
In the short run, Wikileaks is a good thing. It gives us very valuable insight into how the US government conducts diplomacy. (Especially shocking to those who aren’t familiar with diplomatic cables is the gossipy nature of the cables. The texts of sixteen-year-old high school girls don’t have the snark and claws that a group of US diplomats have. Other commentators point out that were these cables submitted to any major newspaper as a story, they would tossed out summarily has poorly sourced and non-objective accounts.) The short-term damage is pretty minimal. As Haas and Nye both point out, there are no shocking revelations in the Wikileaks cables. (My God! The Afghan government is corrupt! And, I’m shocked! Shocked that spying is going on at the UN!) These are no Pentagon Papers. Which is not to say they aren’t valuable. The chief damage from the release is loss of trust that US diplomats can keep a confidence. But this will soon pass. (It is possible that some informant may come to some harm for having talked to US diplomats, but there is no evidence that this has happened or is at high risk of happening.)
But if Wikileaks were to continue to operate and release such cables on a regular basis, it would seriously impair the ability of the US government to conduct diplomacy. A one-time massive dump of overclassified government documents is one thing, the steady release in perpetuity is quite another.
Ideally, the US government response will be more transparency. If I recall correctly from my government days, most diplomatic cables are supposed to be classified for three years. What the government should do is set up a system to routinely declassify and release on the internet most three-year-old diplomatic cables. Those that were especially sensitive could be held longer and sources and names of informants can be redacted for their privacy and protection. It wouldn’t be hard to do, especially if diplomats got into the habit of as they write the cables of carefully flagging the information that was truly sensitive, as opposed to classified just because you don’t want to reveal your negotiating strategy. Such long-term thinking about classification and sources would also improve the quality of the information that goes into them. Any good journalist will tell you a good sourcing policy is not about protecting sources as much as it is a discipline to ensure you’re getting the story right. In short, the US government should aim at putting Wikileaks out of business by making them unnecessary.
And Shirky is correct in assessing that independent groups with no checks and balances on them, like Wikileaks, are a two-edged sword. They can be of great benefit in exposing government’s failings, but they can also do tremendous damage.
And as a final thought, Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo puts an interesting spin on Wikileaks by asking how long they would have been allowed to operate if, instead of diplomatic cables, they were posting tracks to an unreleased Lady GaGa album or episodes of the next season of Mad Men.
(In case you’re wondering what this has to do with word origins, it doesn’t. But on occasion I write about censorship, copyright, and journalism and Wikileaks is right up this alley. Also, as someone who was involved on the margins of US diplomacy some years ago, I think I’ve got an informed (if dated) and disinterested perspective on the issue. And no, none of the cables I wrote are among those yet released, but I’m still hoping.)
