George Kendall’s piece on Julian Assange was quite good. If it wasn’t I’d scarcely bother replying. And no, I am not Mr Assange’s spokesman, but as Mr Assange’s spokesman is quite busy I thought I’d jump in and attempt a defence.
Firstly I think Tunisia is a bit of a red herring here, and it would in any case provide only an empirical proof to say that Wikileaks is good or bad based upon one revolution or several. It would say nothing about the general morality. I’d much rather argue from general principles, as George Kendall then goes on to do.
As I can see it there are two elements to his proof:
- That some things do need to be kept hidden
- That the decision as to what those things should be should be taken by elected leaders.
Now firstly I would argue that that is precisely what happens now: Wikileaks is just a website, it relies on leakers just as we did before Wikileaks – it just makes the leakers jobs technically easier. Wikileaks doesn’t mean all information is publicly available, it just means that anything which is leaked has a home on the internet. Legally and morally, leaking is just as difficult as it ever was. Information laws still exist, and those who break them take an extraordinary risk in so doing. You might think leaking was easy for Assange, it certainly wasn’t for Bradley Manning.
Leaving Manning aside, these rules are – in the UK at least – put in place by elected governments, and enforced by a judiciary supervised by an elected government.
Maybe that is the way the law needs to be. But here is where I have a problem with the attitude behind these laws – and where I side with Assange over Kendall. Freedom of information legislation stems from an elite discourse. It is predicated upon discussions between the political, civil, and occasionally military elite, behind closed doors, and using by examples of which – until Wikileaks – we simply had no ken.
Seeking to persuade our representatives will do nothing to change the nature of that discourse – it doesn’t intend to. And we can see from the Wikileaks cables how wrong our representatives are on this – and of the damage a solely elite view of what is and isn’t in the public interest can have. What made me angry, furious, about the Wikileaks cables was how many of them were utterly banal. Why should the news that the Americans complained that Little Mosque on the Prairie contained a “rude and eccentric depiction” of an official at a U.S. consulate, be a classified state secret? Or that the French felt sorry for Stephen Harper? Or that Ed Balls is uninspiring? Or that Sarkozy looked bored on a state visit to Saudi Arabia?
A democratic government, admittedly for the most part not ours, determined that these “secrets” should be buried forever lest they damage our society irretrievably. The elite had become so blaze about depriving us of information that they were making everything confidential, whether it was merited or not. But that should not be a surprise: that is what any discourse which is not challenged does (and elite discourses rarely are). And the effect is that we slip ever closer towards a government that admits nothing, that does not allow the citizen to form a view of its actions. As I said in the comments to the original article, this leads to Rousseau’s worst fear – an elective dictatorship.
Wikileaks engendered a mass discourse. It offered a challenge to the pervading orthodoxy. It forced the argument into the open. It required it to be had with people who weren’t of the elite. It offered us – the citizens – the chance to develop an informed answer to the question. And whilst it may have caused some problems for diplomats (but has diplomacy ever not been an arms race between secret-keepers and secret-breakers?) I cannot think of another way in which that discourse could have been engendered.
Gramsci described hegemony as the ideological dominance of society. Our elite had imposed their hegemony upon our view of what should and shouldn’t be talked about. Now that hegemony has been shattered and we can build a new hegemony – only this time it will have to come out of a mass discourse. And that, for me, will be worth everything.
Fred Carver is a former Liberal Democrat councillor in the London Borough of Camden. He blogs on world elections and politics at Who Rules Where.
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6 Comments
I’m afraid you lost me as soon as you started bandying around the phrase ‘elite discourse’, which is a nonsense term. Was Bradley Manning a member of this ‘elite’? Are there any studies – actual, scientific studies – which say this elite is different to the rest of us, and not just a subset? Or is it just a convenient term used to justify a particular political position, which is that there’s a radical disjunction in society between a supposed elite and the governed?
Yes and no, which is to say you certainly have a point. There is a lot of discourse theory about and a lot of it mentions the elite either explicitly (which has tended to be more of a Marxist thing, but not exclusively) or implicitly in terms of access to knowledge: from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, to Norman Faricolugh’s Language and power, and although Gramsci was too early to use the term we’d talk about much of his work on hegemony now in terms of discourse theory.
But you did kind of hit the nail on the head when you said it is “just a convenient term used to justify a particular political position”, very often it is, and a lot of the theories of elite discourse do fall down around this point. But I still think they are right when it comes to something like Wikileaks. Of course the elite are a subset of the mass, but they are a qualitatively different subset when it comes to things like that because they have the knowledge. Bradley manning, and everyone else who had clearance up to the “Secret” level, was a member of that elite, the rest of us weren’t. I agree the phrase “elite discourse” is often nonsense but here it actually applies. There is a subset of society that has access to knowledge denied to the rest of us
I also should have mentioned, I thought the US supreme court got this right in: New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 714 (1971) when they said that as “the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in [national security] may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government” and therefore the media has a right to publish all documents they find in the public interest, regardless of their level of state secrecy or how they got them. In other words, under US law, you can publish in the public interest anything you find, even if it is classified Top Secret, even if you stole it, without any criminal or civil liability.
Fred, thanks for your piece.
This debate is too often a polarised battle, where real debate gets lost. Great to have a chance to seriously discuss the issue. I’ll try to do justice to your piece with a relatively long reply.
I completely agree with you that we need to talk about general principles, rather than specific examples. The Tunisian revolution, may, or may not, have been partly triggered by Wikileaks. The cause of democracy may, or may not, have been damaged by Wikileaks leaking the confidential briefings of a US diplomat in Zimbabwe. But there will always be examples to prove either case.
And my concerns apply, not just to Wikileaks, but to what I call the wider Wikileaks movement. Although Openleaks appear to be more consistent in their philosophy of openness, I am still concerned with what they want to do.
In my opinion, at the centre of this debate are two competing rights:
– the right to free information
– the right to privacy
Normally, we think of the right to privacy as being the right to a private life, but it goes far further than that. When I’m unsure what I think, and I don’t feel ready to discuss an issue on the open internet, I sometimes discuss it in the private LDV members forum. That is so my tentative opinions aren’t permanently recorded for the entire world to see (and there are internet archiving sites which would do just that with anything written in LDV). I want the freedom to think aloud, to have others critique what I’m saying, and then polish my prose before I publish it.
If the right to free information were to say: anything anyone writes anywhere should be freely available for access to the public, I would immediately stop using the private members forum in that way. My right to express myself in a private forum would be curtailed in order to satisfy the right of someone else to publish my private musings.
The same is true of government.
Their diplomats have, effectively, been using an intranet, restricted to those who have security clearance, to share things with colleagues they otherwise wouldn’t be able to share. It may be information from confidential sources. It may be opinion which they wouldn’t want to disclose because revealing it could have indesirable consequences. It might be opinion, held strongly enough to give in a confidential setting, but not sufficiently grounded in evidence to give publicly.
By leaking this information indiscriminately, Wikileaks have undermined the rights of US diplomats to use a private intranet.
Fred, you complain that the fact that “Sarkozy looked bored on a state visit to Saudi Arabia?” shouldn’t be a classified state secret. Do you think your private opinions in email exchanges to friends should be published to the world?
But revealing diplomatic briefings could have much more serious consequences than publishing the contents of your, or my, inbox. If the US Ambassador publicly stated that Sarkozy looked bored on a state visit, it would damage relations with France. And this sort of damage can have real consequences, in damaging US-French relations, and making trade deals harder to negotiate. The job of the US Ambassador is to pass on banal information to the US State Department, which might, despite it’s banality, be of some importance in understanding what is going on in the world of international relations.
There is, of course, a geniune tension between these two competing rights.
If the government is lying to its people, then, unless there are compelling reasons for this not to be revealed, then my sympathy is with the one who leaks the information. Just as my sympathy was with Clive Ponting. If illegal acts have been committed, then again, leaking this information, to force the government to take action over this illegality, trumps the freedom of government officials to have a private forum where they can pass information which is not suitable for publication.
I don’t doubt there are problems with the way we handle secrecy in this country. There probably should be changes. But it’s a delicate balance between two competing rights. It shouldn’t be decided unilaterally by organisations like Wikileaks, but by our elected representatives.
The language of “rights” suggests an absolutist position – the idea that either freedom of information, or alternatively privacy, should be considered absolutely right or absolutely wrong. It ain’t so. Both the advocates of freedom, and the representatives of governments who would like to reach decisions by private negotition, have a case. They can’t both win.
If we let government decide the issue to suit themselves, and government means a tyrannical despot, or just a cosy rich cabal, then we permit injustice. What about when there are some elected representatives around? George Kendall says that this makes all the difference, presumably because they can be trusted to decide wisely. But what if those elected representatives are largely powerless, a figleaf allowed to exist so as to create the appearance of democracy, when the reality is autocracy? Surely that’s not the same.
So, we wouldn’t trust the MPs in Zimbabwe, or Iran, for example.
How different, in fact, is Britain?
Powerful vested interests hold sway in Britain as in most of the rest of the world. In that situation my sympathies are with Wikileaks. It’s like the Robin Hood story. If governments are unjust, outlaws deserve a chance to put things right.
I might go away and have a think before replying at length. All i’d say for the moment is that we have an arms race between the secret keepers and the leakers, and t’was ever thus. You can talk in private, but there will be other people trying to find out what you say. So you have to try harder to keep your privacy private. That is the way its always been. For most of history the keepers have had the whip hand over the leakers. Maybe its the anarchist in me, but I quite like that the playing field is more even. But I’d say all it is is more even, the secret keepers still appear to have the upper hand.
What I like is the idea the US supreme court have is separating that whole process and argument, from the issue of what one does with the information when you have it – which is where wikileaks come in in a moral sense. And again what I like is that in answering that question they simply apply one test: public interest. Now should our elected leaders clarify public interest? Probably, but (and again maybe this is the anarchist in me) personally I’d rather err on the side of saying information is in the public interest than isn’t