Micah L. Sifry - WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency

WIKILEAKS
AND THE AGE OF
TRANSPARENCY

Andrew Rasiej

In 2008, my then eighty-two-year-old father received a call from a Polish military historian who had uncovered an old file secretly hidden for sixty-seven years. It contained a list with the names of Polish prisoners of war who had been killed in the basement of the headquarters of the Soviet secret police in Kiev in 1940 on the orders of Josef Stalin. Until this file was discovered, these men were part of a missing group of 7,000 out of a total of 22,000 POWs, mostly officers, who were murdered in what is known as the Katyn Massacre.

Among those 7,000 names was my father's father, Zigmunt Rasiej. My grandfather was the county police commissioner in the town of Brody in the eastern part of Poland when he was arrested, imprisoned, then executed and buried in an unmarked mass grave just outside Kiev. Until 1992, Russian authorities had claimed that the Nazis killed these 22,000 men as they retreated from Moscow in the winter of 1943.

In 1940, had a fair-minded Soviet soldier came across secret Politburo documents indicating that the Poles were to be systematically murdered, had this same person leaked those documents to media throughout the free worldwhatever might have befallen that whistleblower, the fate of those menthe intellectual elite, the leaders of Polish societywould have certainly been different. The result might even have altered the course of the war. Who knows? I do believe that if such information had been leaked, my grandfather would not have died with a bullet to the back of his head along with his fellow countrymen.

History is rife with examples of people suffering the consequences of duplicity and hypocrisy by government and institutional leaders. My family's story about persecution at the hands of unjust individuals is not unique: it is still being repeated on a daily basis around the worldthousands of times.

I am watching with fascination as the WikiLeaks saga unfolds. I have tried my best to separate my feelings about its embattled founder, Julian Assange, from the greater questions that now need answers. What is the nature of information in a connected age? Does the Internet and technology help or hurt the cause of free speech and human rights? Can companies like Amazon, Paypal, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Mastercard, etc. at once aim for a profit, exploit the advantages of the Internet, and behave morally? How can we ensure that whistleblowers continue to speak out when needed? And is WikiLeaks a symptom of decades of governmental and institutional opacity, or is it a disease that needs to be stopped at all costs?

These questions, and the debates over the answers, will continue to rage long after this book gets downloaded for the last time. But we have clearly entered a new chapter in human history, where information technology has advanced so far as to render law, regulation, and social conventions powerless to keep up with its ability to change the course of human events.

Where do we go from here?

Governments, like people, need to keep some secrets, withholding information from time to time, to achieve reasonable goals. Discretion is part of the social fabric binding people in their personal lives and in business. It is reasonable to allow diplomats, military planners, and even politicians the freedom to use secrets in the service of their country.

However, there is a difference between withholding information and blatantly lying to the people to whom one is accountable. The issue is not whether WikiLeaks did the right thing, or whether it should even exist. The real question is what responsibility do governments and institutions like them (for example, the Roman Catholic Church) have to build systems within their power structures so that they remain accountable? When those in power work harder to protect themselves than they do to maintain mechanisms of oversight and justice, opacity wins out over transparencybut only for a limited time. Eventually, a weak link in the hierarchy of power shows up. What is needed is not a call for radical transparency, which some might interpret WikiLeaks' mission to be. Rather, we should be demanding that the default setting for institutional power be "open," and when needed those same powers should be forced to argue when things need to remain closed. Right now, the default setting is "closed," and the public is just left arguing.

Laws and regulations must be updated to reflect that freedom of speech in our connected, networked, and handheld printing press world is different from what our forefathers imagined when including it at the heart of the Constitution. The hypocrisy of the American government's reaction to WikiLeaks is a case in point. If we promote the use of the Internet to overturn repressive regimes around the world, then we have to either accept the fact that these same methods may be used against our own regimeor make sure our own policies are beyond reproach.

The people and companies behind the technology need to be transparent about what information they collect. They need to develop consistent policies to allow individuals to opt in, or out, of their data collection systems. They also need to develop standards so that people quickly learn of government requests for their documentation or information about them. We must have a right to protect the privacy of information stored in the cloud as rigorously as if it were in our own home. Finally, there must be widespread acknowledgment that much of our public discourse occurs on corporate networks and servers, and these corporations must robustly defend the open Internet that they are so handily profiting from. Angry rhetoric from politicians or a hint of a possible criminal investigation should not be enough to cause companies to kick unpopular speakers off their services.

Lastly, citizens must educate themselves. Each time we buy a new gadget from Apple or sign up for another two-year contract from Verizon, post a photo on Facebook, or drive through a tollbooth, we join a never-ending dance of data collection with not a clue as to what the consequences might be. There are those who argue that such collection of data about every click, every download, or transit card swipe make our lives more convenient, efficient, and safer, and in many ways they are right. But what price do we pay? What will we do when the net becomes so powerful we can't escape it, that we can't find even a semblance of privacy or not be able to define it for ourselves any longer?

As you read my colleague and friend Micah Sifry's thorough analysis of the WikiLeaks phenomenon and how it fits into the much larger global movement for transparency, I hope we can agree that a future where citizens are the ultimate authority requires the best, most timely, and most accurate information. Interestingly, that's the same reason Julian Assange says he created WikiLeaks in the first place.