The world needs a hero, but instead it got Assange, who you have consistently opposed as a bad actor, bad person, etc regardless of the format of the leak. So you have specific accusations with no merit (“To what extent is Assange responsible for Bradley Manning’s problems?”) alongside your general statements of support for transparency. Well, let’s have some real talk.
The US government under both Bush and to a possibly greater extent Obama have made it clear they have no interest in setting up a credible internal mechanic to facilitate whistleblowing, and if anything we are further along towards hyper-classification than we were a few years ago. Your “good actors”, such as they are, happen to be in the midst of a collapse of traditional journalism generally, and thus only take an intermittent interest in these affairs when the cost-benefit of collusion with the government is apparently unsatisfactory. That’s not to say there aren’t good journalists and good publications, but that they are not the ones calling the shots on a systemic level.
So the concept of involuntary transparency comes into the marketplace of ideas through Wikileaks, capitalizing on modern technology and communication in order to put primary sources on government and corporate actions in the hands of anyone who wants to see them. They publicize documentation of crimes alongside the relatively mundane workings of state, and they did come up with a model (of collaborating with news organizations) that would represent a sort of middle ground that most people who think transparency is important.
The response to this was overwhelming government efforts to smear, hack, criminalize, and otherwise harass anyone who cooperated, while publicly torturing the presumed source of the leaks. While WL held it together for a while, it seems clear that the organization hit a breaking point a few months back and the worst-case scenario for its supporters took place, namely the BLEAARRGHing of all of the files all over the internet using the encryption password that had already become public knowledge. The degree to which this leak was intentional on the part of Assange, his new best enemy Domscheit-Berg, and any of a number of other links in the chain is extremely murky at the moment, because the fundamental paradox/hypocrisy of the organization has been that it has always seem determined to be secretive even before it had real cause to be paranoid and long after it ceased to be beneficial to its self-defense. This, by the way, has always been a problem but a secondary consideration in the broader context of the transparency debate so long as basic security protocols (change your passwords, dumbass) were observed.
So we’re left with a number of enduring echoes from this whole experience. First, that transparency units like the one set up by Al-Jazeera in the wake of the original furor are a good idea, and that plenty of other good hybrid approaches to transparency are possible. Second, if you’re a whistleblower you need to be selective about the information you release to a third party, because frankly the amount of time it was held back in Manning’s case is nothing short of exceptional and unlikely to be the norm. Third, there is no popular momentum for transparency, and there is a great deal of establishment counterpressure that attaches enormous consequences to participation in involuntary transparency regardless of the outcome of a particular leak. That’s where your consistent opposition to Wikileaks comes into play, and the fundamental contradiction between supporting transparency as a principle but being opposed to Wikileaks for the wide variety of reasons you’ve had through the duration of this story.
As for actual consequences, no one knows as of yet because there’s been so much material released, but the Australian government is already claiming one of its intelligence agents was outed, so I guess it’s ‘embarrassing’ for him/her.
I guess so, but since the Australian government and specifically their attorney general have been leveraging Wikileaks into the creation of a stronger, more invasive security apparatus from the outset (including pursuing far broader authority internationally earlier in the year for its typically small-scale domestic security organ) it’s hard to take them seriously without hard evidence. It’s entirely possible that someone was harmed by this, but it’s also true that the current stance does not represent a shift in position from when they were regarding redacted leaks or anything else. Both things matter, but not with the same level of impact.
So Wikileaks is fucked up, and may not survive this in a meaningful sense. I still think Gates was fundamentally on the money with the embassy cables themselves, but that doesn’t change that this compromises about half of the WL mission in a serious and possibly irreparable way simply because it breaches their security credibility. But the demonstrated fact that governments (alongside public opinion) oppose transparency reforms internally and will not tolerate externally driven ones is what actually matters, and continues to dictate the terms of the game. Agreeing with that as some abstract principle is useless, and I would submit that your willingness to take any angle against Wikileaks over time represents exactly that. We’ll just sit back and wait for the correct paragon of justice and public relations to come along and take on the issue of transparency in a more palatable manner. I suggest you pack a lunch.
