Wikileaks ≠ Transparency
Posted by Allison Fine on December 2, 2010
As much as I hate using “gate” moniker, I want to discuss what is being called “Cablegate” because its ramifications for organizational life.
If you’ve been leaving beneath your bed for the last few weeks, you may not know that Cablegate refers to the release of thousands of secret State Department communications by Wikileaks. Here is good synopsis of the lead by Time Magazine.
Wikileaks first came onto the world’s radar screen by posting a video of American soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians. This is whistleblowing. The American military it appears had done a terrible thing and then covered it up. This is what journalists do, they uncover the bad things that companies and governments do and shed light on them. Daniel Ellsberg is one of the world’s most famous whistleblowers, having released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times to reveal the lies that the US government was telling the public about their administration of the war in Vietnam.
Cablegate isn’t whistleblowing, it isn’t righting a wrong, unveiling unethical or immoral behavior. It is the theft of regular communications that makes it nearly impossible for the State Department to function.
One of the smartest people I know, well, actually one of the smartest people anywhere, Esther Dyson, discussed the downside of what she called “radical transparency” at Transparency Camp last year a double edged sword for organizational leaders. Beth Kanter reported Esther saying at the camp, “Esther Dyson said that transparency should be able the results and any deals, but there is a place for private discussion. “We could all go around naked and look like angels, but in the real world that doesn’t happen.” Transparency has its benefits, but so does privacy. As Esther Dyson said, “There is a need for respect – of relationships, to get trust, and further understandings. You can’t be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.”
And there is why I respectfully disagree with my friend and colleague, Micah Sifry, who wrote yesterday on his blog on TechPresident, “…there is a danger rising both to internet freedom and open government here, but that is not because of Wikileaks. It is because people who are threatened by more transparency want to stop this trend before it is completely uncontrollable.”
Leaks like Cablegate might be inevitable, however they are not honorable or constructive. Street crime might be inevitable but that doesn’t make it right. It also makes the word of transparency advocates, like Micah, much harder because it masks the true beauty and value of transparency which is to enable outsiders to get in and insiders to get out in order to make the work or product or law better. Transparency is not an academic exercise or window dressing for show, when done well and right, for instance in the ways that the Sunlight Foundation works, it makes the work better. Releasing every day cables of conversations within the State Department doesn’t make anything better, it just makes the work harder to do at all, much less do well.
The leakers, including Wikileaks, should be punished for it. How is any organization or government agency supposed to do business, to wrestle with complicated situations where the answers aren’t clear cut, in other words deal with the world as it is, if every conversation, every thought, every musing is going to be public.
The shame as Micah points out is that this kind of behavior provides cover for anti-transparency forces to have an excuse to become more opaque. They would would head in that direction anyway. News organizations should not have printed these leaks, it wasn’t news, it was a crime.
OK, folks, start disagreeing now!
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This entry was posted on December 2, 2010 at 7:42 am and is filed under Social Media. Tagged: Esther Dyson, micah sifry, sunlight foundation, techpresident, Wikileaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
11 Responses to “Wikileaks ≠ Transparency”
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Ron Vassallo said
Amen, sister. Agree with 90% of the blog. Not sure you can blame the news media for publishing information that will be in the public domain anyway. If anything, they have provided useful analysis and the reasonable assessment that in fact most of the leaked information isn’t news…well, except for willfully ignorant who believed the state of Israel was anything more than a red herring for Middle Eastern despots.
Allison Fine said
Thanks, Ron, I just worry that the Times publishing the info gives it a legitimacy that it shouldn’t have had. But maybe I’m just being polyanna-ish about journalism to expect that.
Scott Anderson said
Hi Allison-
Great post. Quick correction. Your reference to the Sunlight Foundation should link to sunlightfoundation.com and NOT sunlightfoundation.org
Allison Fine said
Thanks so much for checking that, I’ll fix it asap.
Christopher Dorobek said
I find this debate fascinating.
I’d highlight this:
The leakers, including Wikileaks, should be punished for it. How is any organization or government agency supposed to do business, to wrestle with complicated situations where the answers aren’t clear cut, in other words deal with the world as it is, if every conversation, every thought, every musing is going to be public.
I would counter — why are we not doing business in a public way? In this age of difficult, complex problems, it seems to call for greater discussion.
There aren’t easy answers – and they require choices. Why should those decisions be made in an open way? Because it is uncomfortable? It may be embarrassing?
Allison Fine said
Thanks, Christopher. Wondering if you know of any organizations that work as radically transparently as you’re suggesting?
Christopher Dorobek said
We’re at the very early stages of this transformation, so… no, I don’t think anybody does.
That being said, particularly in government, we haven’t lived in an open and transparent environment. In part, that is because the tools haven’t existed to enable this level of transparency and openness. We do, however, have a lot of experience with what the “wrestle with complicated situations” behind closed doors leads us — a citizenry that, by and large, distrusts government almost as a rule.
The WikiLeak case is unique because clearly there are conversations that need to be behind private. But I’ll offer a simple case: The Obama administration’s sustainability plans. These were plans agencies had to submit under Executive Order 13423 for agencies to be more green. These plans were developed without any openness or transparency — sometimes even within agencies themselves… they were then submitted to OMB without any openness or transparency. Why? What are we afraid of?
IMHO, those plans could have — and should have — been developed in a public way as to tap wisdom that may exist within agencies… within other agencies… even outside government…
They should have been submitted in public. Then it would be clear whether agencies took these plans seriously at all.
And it would enable people to see what changes OMB made to those plans.
To me, this seems to be a simple — and relatively easy — example. And yet we don’t do it.
Are there dangers sharing information? Absolutely. But there are scores of examples (just read the 9/11 Commission’s final report) of the dangers of NOT sharing information.
There are scores of lessons to learn from the WikiLeaks case. Unfortunately it seems to me that the lesson everybody is taking away is that information sharing is dangerous. And, as I’ve suggested, it is… but so is failing to share information.
Mazarine said
Dear Alison,
I am going to respectfully disagree with you.
We do need more transparency from our government, and we need to be more involved in the process. To know that the government is full of missteps, mistakes, opinions and ideas is just part of the transparency package.
Not everything is smooth and neat. And if our internet presence, globally, is going to continue to expand, this would have happened anyway. I say, let’s embrace the changes. People are going to get embarrassed. People are going to be upset. But this is a part of growth.
Mazarine
Hayley S said
Okay, wow. This makes me a little bit crazy. First of all, Bradley Manning stole the cables and sent them to Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. While the cables did include a decent amount of useless but amusing information, they also included sensitive information that could threaten our security.
According to the Time article Allison cited in her post, “In Korea, the nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong Il learned that its longtime protector, China, may be turning on it and is willing to contemplate unification of the peninsula under the leadership of the South Korean government in Seoul. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discovered through the leak that while his Arab neighbors were publicly making nice, privately they were pleading with the U.S. to launch an attack against Tehran’s nuclear program…What is plain is that in Iran and elsewhere, the WikiLeaks revelations could change history.” (Time Magazine)
Also according to that article, and on the other hand, “the number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75%, from 105,163 in 1996 to 183,224 in 2009…Not surprisingly, the number of people with access to that Everest of information has grown too.” Certainly, the government could be a little more choosy about what they designate as secret, and what is viewable to the public. In this respect, our government could be more transparent. But stealing information and publishing it on the internet is not the way to encourage transparency.
Let’s not forget that regardless of how transparent our own government is/becomes, that will not change the way other countries are run. For the sake of our safety some things must be kept private. Ultimately, that is what government is set up to do – protect our basic rights, and to provide order and encourage prosperity. It’s astounding how often we as citizens contradict ourselves – we want the government to win wars, to encourage growth in our economy, to provide us with basic services, etc, and yet we are constantly complaining that the govt is too involved in our lives, that it must be completely transparent so that we, the citizens who have entrusted our faith in our representatives by voting for them can see exactly what they’re doing at all times. There’s something here that doesn’t ring true.
Bottom line: I agree with Allison. These guys deserve some serious repercussions. I will say, though, that I don’t think it’s the Wikileaks’ guy’s fault, though. Ultimately, he’s not the one that stole the information. Nor is it the fault of the media – they’re just doing their jobs. But I sincerely hope that Private First Class Bradley Manning gets some sort of punishment. Stealing classified documents is simply not acceptable.
Ron Vassallo said
I absolutely agree although I would point out the Assainge’s stated goal is the undermining of the U.S. as a “civilization” so I find it difficult to sympathize with the man or his supporters. As for PFC Manning, his odyssey has just begun.
nonprofitssavetheworld said
It seems to me the government is doing enough to undermine itself by keeping secret things that need not be kept secretin a democracy. In a democracy, we are the govenrment, and without free flow of information we cannot maintain a domocracy. Although I agree that some information needs to be kept confidential, committing crimes in the name of the People are not among them. The media serves as a check against governmental abuse of power, and since the demise of newspaper reporting and abdication of television and radio news to commercialism, we rely more and more on social media for the information we need. In turn, it is up to our new journalists to understand what is and what is not legitimate under the agreed-upon, open laws of the People.