The ethics of leaking secrets (original) (raw)
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Disclosure’s Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency
Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm and stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure's beneficial effects against its harmful ones—what I have described as transparency's balance. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure's effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks' ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass the legal framework that would otherwise allow courts and officials to consider and balance disclosure's effects. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens to make transparency's balance irrelevant. Second, its recent massive disclosures of U.S. military and diplomatic documents allow us to reconsider and test the assumption that disclosure produces certain effects that can serve as the basis for judicial and administrative prediction, calculation, and balancing. For this reason, WikiLeaks threatens transparency's balance by disproving its assumption that disclosure necessarily has predictable, identifiable consequences that can be estimated ex ante or even ex post. This Article studies WikiLeaks in order to test prevailing laws and theories of transparency that build on the assumption that disclosure's effects are predictable, calculable, and capable of serving as the basis for adjudicating difficult cases. Tracing WikiLeaks' development, operations, theories, and effects, it demonstrates the incoherence and conceptual poverty of an effects model for evaluating and understanding transparency.
We're leaking, and everything's fine: How and why companies deliberately leak secrets
Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks: (1) whether the information in the leak is factual or concocted and (2) whether leaks are conducted overtly or covertly. Using these two dimensions, we identify four types of leaks: informing, dissembling, misdirecting, and provoking. We also provide a framework to help managers decide whether or not they should leak secrets.
We’re leaking, and everything’s fine: How and why companies deliberately leak secrets
Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks: (1) whether the information in the leak is factual or concocted and (2) whether leaks are conducted overtly or covertly. Using these two dimensions, we identify four types of leaks: informing, dissembling, misdirecting, and provoking. We also provide a framework to help managers decide whether or not they should leak secrets.
2014
Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch's obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events-among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration's infamous leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters-undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, and open sources all constitute paths out of the government's informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish.
The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden are among the most topical whistleblowing cases where journalists got involved to publish articles based on leaked information. On occasion of these major leaks, strategies of circulation restrictions were activated in order to stop the dissemination of the leaked material. In the Pentagon Papers case, The New York Times first published the material and received a restraining order to stop the publication (Diamond 1993); WikiLeaks was targeted with digital DDoS attacks aimed at putting it offline. In the case of Edward Snowden, The Guardian was instead forced to physically destroy hard drives where leaked documents were allegedly stored (Greenwald 2014a). This paper analyses the evolution of content circulation restriction strategies and their effectiveness in whistleblowing cases by means of the three aforementioned case studies, focusing on the material nature of the leaked documents. The analysis focuses on issues of digital materialization, content circulation and journalism, contributing to the debate on these topics in STS.
A Digital Ménage à Trois: Strategic Leaks, Propaganda and Journalism [DRAFT ATTACHED]
Countering Online Propaganda and Violent Extremism: The Dark Side of Digital Diplomacy, 2018
While leaking isn't new, the scale of recent data releases and new methods deployed by political actors to influence public opinion transform the process. State and non-state actors controlling the flow of information (from politicians and governments, to those seeking to undermine them, such as whistleblowers) have long used leaks strategically to shape public opinion, decision-making and the distribution of power itself. Increasingly leaks are used within a networked propaganda strategy to offer pressures and opportunities unique to our globalised digital age. Powerful, competing elites, and those seeking to disrupt or question their power, both combine leaking with emerging advanced methodologies in hacking, (counter-)surveillance and propaganda, meaning these cannot be understood in isolation in today's information environment. This chapter introduces readers to scholarly and popular debates regarding strategic leaking, propaganda and journalistic reporting. We focus on political, governmental and whistleblowing disclosures affecting the US, analysing how key actors attempt to manage and exploit leaks in the case studies of the 2016 US presidential election and the 'Panama Papers'. We aim to generate discussion about the role of leaks in shaping public perceptions within democracies, ultimately questioning how such disclosures are used by whom and why.
Making Transparency Possible. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, 2019
Information leaks and the revelation of government secrets by hackers have become issues of note in Turkey's political sphere during the course of the last ten years. Turkey has also witnessed a steady flow of leaks in recent years. Of these, the MİT (The National Intelligence Organization) trucks case, concerning the role of the Turkish secret service in supplying weapons to jihadist militants in Syria, has perhaps been the most distinctive. This chapter discusses whether the MİT Trucks scandal can be regarded as a whistleblowing leak serving the public interest in terms of its revelations, the identities of its sources, its wider political entanglements, and the timing of its emergence into the public domain.
WikiLeaks: Vigilance to vigilantes and back again, or designing hues of transparency and democracy
This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.