Bren’s thoughts on the Wikileaks release of the US Embassy Cables

The release of the contents of the US Embassy cables via the Wikileaks organization has recently fascinated me, not only in terms of the content of the cables themselves, but also the way that governments, mainstream media organizations, and individuals have responded to them.

I love knowledge, and I love knowing more about what’s really going on in the world. I’d love to work for CSIS some day, although I know perfectly well they won’t have me (I don’t have a driver’s license, among other reasons.) So I read about six or seven different newspapers around the world every day.

So, some of the contents didn’t surprise me. I already knew, for instance, that most Muslim countries are more worried than you are about Iran getting a nuclear bomb. But I suppose I was surprised to learn that China might be prepared to accept a unified Korea, and might not help protect North Korea if war broke out between the North and South. I was also surprised to learn that Muamar Gadaffi, President of Libya, travels with a “voluptuous” Ukranian nurse. Why this particular item of interest has made so much news is an essay in itself, but probably one with a thesis about sex, rather than free speech, at its heart.

But what has surprised me most is the way in which certain individuals responded to the fact of the cables’ publication. For example, various people, including US Senator Joe Lieberman, are calling for the death of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Similarly, Sarah Palin demanded that he be “hunted down like Al Quaeda”.

With that in mind, let’s think back a few weeks. It seems that almost everyone was outraged by Arkansas school board trustee Clint McCance who cheered on the suicide-deaths of gay teenage boys. Some of you may also recall Donal Blaney, the chief executive of a group called the Young Britons Foundation, who openly described his organization as a “Tory madrasa”. In some barely concealed weasel-words, he called for environmental activists who trespass on private property to be shot.

Whatever your politics: under any other normal situation, it is regarded as gravely immoral to demand the death of another human being. I think we should not allow each other to become too flippant with demands for death. When you make such demands, you might feel as if you are taking a serious stand on a serious issue. You may also be egged-on, and socially rewarded, by people who appear to have some real courage with their convictions. But that bandwagon, my friends, has a very dark destination.

Getting back to the topic of Wikileaks: here’s a second concern of mine. It’s worth noting that organizations like Amazon, PayPal, etc., which severed computer links with Wikileaks, thus making it harder for Wikileaks to carry on doing what it does, are private companies, not government agencies. They can do what they want with their own domains. They can add or remove people in accord with their own “terms and conditions”. Nor is there any demand that they be consistent in how they apply their terms. A big bookseller like Amazon could cease hosting WIkileaks whilst still selling books written by hate-mongers and racists; and a money changer like PayPal could cease transferring donations to Wikileaks whilst continuing to allow donations to political organizations with an openly racist agenda. So I suspect that some of the ire presently directed at the US government for censorship probably should be directed instead at the private entities which have made it harder for people to read what they want to read, and say what they want to say.

I think these decisions, by these companies, can be taken as evidence that the internet is not a public commons. Although millions of people use such virtual spaces as if it is a public commons, we don’t vote for the landlord, and he isn’t democratically accountable to us. (Our ‘consumer sovereignty’ by which we ‘vote with our dollars’ is a kind of illusion, really, because some people get more votes (i.e. more dollars) than others.) So the landlord, who we didn’t really vote for, can kick you out for whatever reason seems good to him. We don’t accept this in our politics. Why do we accept this in our economy?

Here’s a third issue. I’m also concerned about how, in the future, people in positions of access to controlled information may be much less willing to share that information, even in the service of a noble and humanitarian cause, if they fear seeing that information in the public sphere in a very short amount of time. Information about human rights abuses, for instance, often gets out to the world only by means of secret or confidential channels. We might never have known about what really happened in places like East Timor, for instance, if prospective informants feared for their lives.

On another, related level, it’s easy to imagine that some leader might be offended enough by things said about him in those cables to retaliate. Imagine if President Gadaffi felt offended by remarks made by US embassy staff about his Ukranian nurse. Might he be sufficiently offended to launch a Lockerbie-bombing style attack on the United States? It is possible, perhaps, that keeping a few things secret, in matters of international diplomacy, is a good thing.

For reasons like those, the Wikileaks revelations may thus end up actually harming the pursuit of world peace and human rights, rather than furthering it. So when you think about the Wikileaks cables, you may have to weigh up the merits and risks of the secrecy that the government sometimes needs to preserve so that it can do its job, versus the public’s need to know what its government is doing so that it can pass a judgment on the government at the next election.

But then again, we should also ask who is reading the cables, now that they are in the public arena. In a straw poll of students in one of my classes last week, only two in a class of 25 knew that the leak had happened. Perhaps the public cares more about what Oprah is wearing today, and the next scandal to hit the participants of Jersey Shore, than about the prospect of a new war in the Middle East, or the fact that Silvio Berlusconi has so many wild parties at night that he is often too tired the next morning to do his job. “The price of peace is eternal vigilance”, said the Irish politician John Philpot Curran – but it seems that most of us are not paying attention.

I’m not sure which worries me more.