WikiLeaks: A public service, or a public menace?

WikiLeaks has just given the world a graduate course “in how governments work,” said Jack Shafer in Slate.com. By exposing tens of thousands of raw diplomatic cables, Julian Assange and his whistle-blower website have revealed scores of presidents, kings, military leaders, and diplomats as “the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers that they are.” Sure, Assange is a “pompous egomaniac” with questionable motives. But his efforts to expose government secrets—including his earlier dumps of incriminating field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan—have restored “our distrust in the institutions that control our lives.” For that, we owe him thanks. Are we better off or worse off knowing that China has already launched cyberattacks on the West? asked John B. Judis in The New Republic. Or that an Afghan official left his country with $52 million stuffed into a suitcase? The answer is obvious. It’s the U.S. government that’s doing a disservice, by keeping so much information secret.

Assange is no truth-teller, said Gordon Crovitz in The Wall Street Journal. He’s a digital terrorist—an anarchist—who despises all authority, views the U.S. as a global oppressor, and is using stolen secrets to restrict the government’s exercise of power. “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society,” Assange recently told Time, “it’s our goal to achieve a more just society.” By releasing the contents of diplomatic cables and other private communications, he hopes to restrict the flow of information among U.S. officials—“conspirators,” as he calls them—in order to render them “less effective.” When investigative journalists expose secrets, said Matthew Olshan in the Baltimore Sun, they and their editors usually exercise judgment and restraint. Consequences of publication are weighed, and information is put into context. Assange simply dumps “mountains of unmediated, sensitive information” on the Web, indifferent to whether it’s used by terrorists or to whose reputation he’s destroying.

Someone has to stand up to America, said Seumas Milne in the London Guardian. The U.S. “is the center of a global empire” and the self-appointed “world leader and policeman.” Given the paucity of checks on American power at home, it’s inevitable and “right that people everywhere will try to challenge and hold it to account.” Since 9/11, said David Samuels in TheAtlantic.com, “a culture of official secrecy has grown by leaps and bounds.” Some 854,000 Americans now have top-secret clearance, and our government makes every effort to block an “informed public discourse.” Assange has shown other activists how the power of the Web and digital technology can level the playing field.

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Secrecy is not inherently bad, said Paul W. Schroeder in The New York Times. Every peace treaty, diplomatic breakthrough, and political compromise in history has involved private conversations and negotiations; without confidentiality, diplomacy is literally impossible. If you want to see what “total transparency produces,” said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, just look at the Bush administration’s record—or lack of one. Vice President Dick Cheney once said, “If you don’t want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don’t write any.” That’s why there are no documents detailing the backroom conversations that led to the war in Iraq. “If everything’s open,” governments simply make sure that nothing is preserved on record. The irony of WikiLeaks is that its reckless exposure of secrets will make government more paranoid, secretive, and closed—not less.