Chasing WikiLeaks (original) (raw)

Marc Thiessen draws upon my article in The New Yorker to make his case against Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, and to argue that American “military assets” could be used “to bring Assange to justice.” Using the military for this purpose would be a terrible idea. WikiLeaks may not be a conventional news organization, but it is not “a criminal syndicate,” as Thiessen asserts, and the notion that the Defense Department should go about destroying privately run Web sites (with infrastructure in friendly countries), because of what those sites publish, suggests a gross misuse of military force. Rather than treating WikiLeaks like a terrorist cell, the military is better off accepting that the Web site is a product of the modern information age, and that it is here to stay, in some form or another, no matter who is running it.

Thiessen’s argument calls to mind the music industry’s effort to shut down Napster—a Web site where recorded music could be traded and downloaded without regard to copyright—in the nineteen-nineties, in that it loses sight of the broader technological and cultural revolution that the Internet has brought to the exchange of information. In 2001, after a lengthy legal battle, the Recording Industry Association of America succeeded in forcing Napster offline, only to watch Napster’s services move to a number of other Web sites that were structured in a more decentralized way (pdf)—making the piracy of music even more diffuse and difficult to prosecute. Only recently has the industry grudgingly been adapting to file-sharing rather than fruitlessly seeking to eliminate it, and one can now find music executives who even speak of Napster as a lost opportunity for their industry.

Shutting WikiLeaks down—assuming that this is even possible—would only lead to copycat sites devised by innovators who would make their services even more difficult to curtail. A better approach for the Defense Department might be to consider WikiLeaks a competitor rather than a threat, and to recognize that the spirit of transparency that motivates Assange and his volunteers is shared by a far wider community of people who use the Internet. Currently, the government has its own versions of WikiLeaks: the Freedom of Information Act and the Mandatory Declassification Review. The problem is that both of these mechanisms can be grindingly slow and inconsistent, in part because the government appears to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of data that should never have been classified to begin with—a phenomenon known as “overclassification.”

Managing so much inaptly classified data comes with certain technical costs, but it presents a very human problem, too: people within the intelligence community will inevitably lose some degree of faith in a system that does not distinguish between genuine secrets and classified material that obviously could be published widely without harm to policy. Such a system devalues secrecy itself, and for all the tough reforms that will likely be implemented after the recent WikiLeaks disclosure of more than seventy thousand classified military reports this July, few will be as effective as combing through the vast and chaotic trove of reflexively classified material and attempting to make large portions of it publicly accessible.

It’s worth recalling the first WikiLeaks project to garner major international attention: a video, shot from an Apache helicopter in 2007, in Iraq, that documented American soldiers killing up to eighteen people. For years, Reuters sought to obtain that video through FOIA because two of its staff members were among the victims. Had the military released this footage to the wire service, and made whatever minor redactions were necessary to protect its operations, there would never have been a film titled “Collateral Murder”—the name of WikiLeaks’s package for the video—because there would have been nothing to leak. Even after Assange had published the footage, and even though the events documented in it had been previously revealed in detail by a Washington Post reporter, the military (at least, as of July) has still not officially released it.

There is a simple lesson here: whatever the imperfections of WikiLeaks as a startup, its emergence points to a real shortcoming within our intelligence community. Secrets can be kept by deterrence—that is, by hunting down the people who leak them, as Thiessen proposes, and demonstrating that such behavior comes with real costs, such as prison time. But there are other methods: keep far fewer secrets, manage them better—and, perhaps, along the way, become a bit more like WikiLeaks. An official government Web site that would make the implementation of FOIA quicker and more uniform, comprehensive, and accessible, and that might even allow anonymous whistleblowers within federal agencies to post internal materials, after a process of review and redaction, could be a very good thing—for the public, and for the official keepers of secrets, too.