The government didn’t play it down, by and large. The government flipped the fuck out, and Gates was just about the sole voice that didn’t make it sound like we were in the midst of an intelligence apocalypse where we were going to wake up to a bodybagged foreign service within the week. To date, his is the position that is supported by evidence.
It’s not ‘positive transparency’ when your cubicle mate discovers you’ve been telling everyone she’s fat, or that your wife finds out you’ve been telling your mates you only married her because she got knocked up.
I don’t know if that’s intentional, but both of those examples seem like obvious instances of justifiable transparency, and a bit sexist to boot. At any rate, you seem to equate people’s feelings being hurt or them being embarrassed with the greater good, and that’s frequently not the case in a national or personal sense. I’m sure lots of people had their feelings hurt by the Pentagon Papers, but that’s not where the ultimate judgment of them has settled as a leak.
Governments, like people, have private thoughts that were never meant to be shared publicly.
You’re anthropomorphizing government to an absurd degree, and it’s leading you down an unfortunate direction. Individuals in government can have private thoughts about their own lives, ambitions, dreams, and the weight of their coworkers (assuming they can keep their mouths shut). Government itself doesn’t have private thoughts or anything of the sort. If you want to stick with “thoughts” as the shorthand, let’s go with that. What government has are “thoughts” that exist on a sliding spectrum of security classification, where you have concepts like operational security, actionable intel, and a wide variety of discretely identifiable indicators for what is open to public oversight, open to independent oversight according to security clearance, and then there’s the tiny fraction of things that need to exist in a space where the people directly affected by it and the people supervising it are practically the same. Where something lies on the spectrum should frequently be attached to a time release of some kind, where once it less actionable or sensitive to a reasonable degree it is downgraded.
What we’ve done particularly in the last decade is overwhelmingly shunt things from the first two categories into the last, to the detriment not only of accountability but strategic effectiveness since it’s difficult to track negligence and criminality. Resistance to reforming that is the real heart of every story with relation to Wikileaks, and the actual flavor of the day outrage is largely tangential to that point.
Once you render all private communications public, public servants will learn to self-censor and not commit their thoughts in writing.
What difference does it make if those private communications are immune to oversight or scrutiny as a matter of course, and then subject to the wailing and gnashing of outraged patriotism whenever the veil is pierced on the assumption that simply being classified makes them justifiably secret and dangerous?
There are instances where the law recognizes absolute transparency doesn’t work. Litigation privilege for example, because we understand that communications depending on circumstance sometimes needs to be private.
That’s right. There are instances, some wiser than others. When that practice becomes the general standard, you have a problem, just as the government would be in deep shit if I could answer any intrusion into my affairs as a citizen with a right to privacy protection. Regardless, there is no blanket right to privacy for individuals, and it’s certainly not the government’s default position with respect to citizens or foreigners. It’s a situationally applied compromise subject to negotiation in the face of circumstance (ie we didn’t come up with things we consider legitimately private fully formed from the start, many of them were gradual decisions based on smaller precedents that came together over time).
Wikileaks doesn’t render all communications in the past, present and future public. It doesn’t even set a precedent for transparency. It’s activism, pure and simple, aiming to achieve greater awareness of government secrecy where the content per se is not the point. It was somewhat successful, but what we are seeing now is an organization that is likely in its death throes, crushed by international pressure and internal rifts. This release is not a careful strategic ploy along the lines of the initial leak, but rather the train going off the rails, and there is no clear picture of what is going on with Domscheit-Berg and the rest of the fiasco. Assange bears a lot of responsibility for that, but frankly I don’t think the outlook was all that good even assuming stronger leadership because whatever blind patriotism couldn’t combat, smear tactics and concern trolling could fill in the blanks for.
The lesson the American government has learned is that it can overreact freely, torture prisoners, cover up crimes, and conceal information that is obviously in the public interest in a consequence-free environment because even when it is in the public eye, there exists a critical mass of apologists for their country no matter what. It can take an American soldier and subject him to inhumane treatment practically in front of the nation, and the label of traitor, accurate though it may be technically or morally depending on your views, is enough to allow that to be a consequence free act that the government manages according to its whims, just as we created a subhuman category of foreign prisoners in order to facilitate their mistreatment.
Regardless, these cables are mostly going to be embarrassing if they are noteworthy at all. Some may be harmful in a material sense, but that doesn’t include the Mexican president claiming it in order to leverage yet another concession from his partners in the US, or yet another US spokesman getting hysterical with vague omens of doom. Regardless, what is in the cables themselves is only a tiny fraction of the issue; it’s not like the position of opponents to Wikileaks was different with redactions, it’s just that now it provides a convenient starting point for the same rhetoric that continues to be hurled against the principle of transparency itself.
