The State of the Situation

Thinking about the vociferous support for WikiLeaks on grounds of ‘freedom of information’, I began to ponder whether or not such a phrase actually has any meaning.

A person or institution has no way of knowing in advance whether information brought to light in this context will be of benefit or to the detriment of their substantive political agendas – because you don’t know what it is.

You can’t be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the WikiLeaks phenomenon in any definitive sense — unless you a completely apolitical — because you don’t know what is coming next. The reason many people have come out in support of WikiLeaks is because at this point they intuit that the information will serve their goals; whether ending the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, or shaking up the institutions of sovereign governments around the globe.

But as soon as information starts coming to light that does not shore up these goals, you can’t possibly be ‘for’ WikiLeaks while staying true to your political program. As Stanley Fish has convincingly argued in "The Trouble With Principle", the problem with neutral liberal principles such as 'freedom of information' is that they have no political content. They are only as good as what you fill them up with.

The value of information is inherently tied to specific institutional or individual contexts. Institutions and individuals have goals. A level of secrecy will always be beneficial to the goals of any organization or institution, whether a government, a corporation or a social justice movement. You can thus only invoke ‘freedom of information’ as a rhetorical ploy when you sense that certain information coming to light might advance your agenda tactically. If it is politically beneficial to keep certain information secret, that is what you will (and should) do if you are in any way serious about advancing your agenda politically.

You would never campaign for more ‘transparency’ or ‘openness’ in regard to information that would, if widely known, harm your cause in some way. This is not to say you are corruptly suppressing the information, you are just judging that in order to advance your agenda it is best that the information is not widely known - whether for tactical reasons or any other. If you are suppressing something that is true but embarrassing, you will only ‘come out with it’ after a pragmatic decision has been made that this would be more beneficial for your agenda than not.

So freedom of information stops right where your core political ambitions begin. Anything that, being freely available, may not be conducive to this agenda, will be regarded by that organisation or individual as legitimately secret. Total freedom of information benefits no one unless you don’t have any specific political objectives in which case information is worthless or superfluous anyway. ‘Information’ has no intrinsic value on its own unless it is helping you in some way to advance the causes in which you have a stake.

So no one is inherently for or against ‘freedom of information’. They are for information that advances their political agendas and see as legitimately secret/withheld information that, if released, would harm the pursuit of those agendas – not necessarily because they are corrupt or they are covering up a criminal enterprise – but because this information is useful for their opponents to have — and their will always be opponents to a political program otherwise it would not be a political program, it would ­be a universal agreement, and hence wouldn’t need one.

So why we all love WikiLeaks now, don’t be so sure you can love it - or similar clone operations that may spring up with different political goals – forever.

In the rush to cope with (and hopefully say something interesting really quickly about) the WikiLeaks phenomenon, I feel that many mainstream commentators have missed a major point that demands first observation and then discussion. There will of course be endless debate as to whether this or that leak was in the public interest, but these debates fail to observe the fundamental structural change that is occurring to the relations of international and domestic governance as a result of this saga.

While open government is a nice idea that will always be floated at opportune moments like this by those that seek to advance their substantive agendas (I am not arguing that this is a bad thing), the founding argument of modern political theory is that security is the main reason that a government exists in the first place. That is, people are not necessarily in the best position to judge, or defend personally, their security interests, and so they must abdicate some of their personal freedom in this regard to a ruler or executive in order that these decision be made to an extent for them. Thus, we will find it a systematic fact of modern statehood that openness will tend to end where security claims and executive government begin (a recent example might be the Belal Khazaal case in NSW where Khazzal was convicted on charges of ‘making a document knowing it could assist in a terrorist act and inciting terrorism’ - part of the post-9/11 legal framework - without his defence lawyer in fact having access to the documents in question, on grounds of national security). The ‘national security’ trump is not merely a potent weapon in debates (in court etc), but the only trump that matters, because from security flows everything else that we value. Security precedes the liberal rights and freedom that we happily enjoy. Thus all rights claims are potentially mediated by judgements of security and security risk. Taken to its logical and apparently perverse conclusions (notably by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt) it has been argued that this is the only decision that matters, and that all of our cherished liberal rights and freedoms are only temporary and illusory.

So how are we to judge if this security ‘trump’ is being played fairly? Well under normal conditions we simply cannot, by definition. The (claimed) reason the information cannot be released is because it would threaten further national security interests, and you as a citizen (or even a politician or judge) have no ground to make an informed decision regarding the appropriateness of this judgment, because you cannot see the information unless it is released. In a sense we just trust (or hope) that a ‘balance’ between liberty and security is handled in a just fashion by the institutions of executive government. Hopes for further openness in this area appear without foundation unless you are willing to argue for the end of the modern sovereign state system. As Rahul Sagar has noted in a recent Polity article, any ‘balance’ struck between what we see as our rightful liberties and the state’s legitimate right of self defense from domestic or foreign security threats is necessarily skewed by the institution of state secrecy. The fact is that someone will have to make a discretionary judgment regarding what information can be safely released and what cannot. He also argues (and I agree) that this is to a great extent inescapable, unless you are willing to argue that all information should be available to all people at all times, a position that is impossible to defend.

However, we may be seeing the beginning of a structural change that could put that all in jeopardy (which is a good or a bad thing depending on your point of view). We have yet to see the result of the inevitable ‘counter-offensive’ by sovereign states in pursuit of returning the power relations of information to the very recently past status quo, but it appears there is something different this time. While people have been prophesising the downfall of the sovereign state as a result of globalisation since, well, the phenomenon of globalisation, this challenge (at least with regards to informational asymmetry) appears substantial indeed.

The openness and adaptability of the internet has consistently bucked attempts to control it. The internet is for all intents and purposes, in the Western world at least, immanent and decentred, and thus short of turning off the power (everywhere) there has been no way found yet to consistently control it. When Napster was shut down, it spawned a thousand clones that saw P2P file sharing become an institution of the internet. This, along with MySpace and its clones, have undermined the record industry to the point that artists are touring constantly because record sales are at an all time low. Efforts to paywall music and news have proved only mildly successful. Open-source communities revolutionised programming, spawning Wikipedia, Open Office and Mozilla. The ability of the internet to copy and distribute information is unprecedented, and this was evident in the speed at which the WikiLeaks information was distributed to thousands of mirrors across the globe in preparation for Assange’s arrest. How do you control something of that speed and efficiency? We are only just beginning to see the real political implications of such technology, which has up until now simply made communication quicker and easier and provided more ways to use our ample leisure time.

For those wondering whether or not their governments are striking a legitimate balance between security and liberty (not to mention how they are behaving in foreign conflicts), there is now an astoundingly greater quantity of information on which to make this judgement. In the future there is potentially an anonymous outlet for agents within the executive asking themselves the same question (although they managed to catch Bradley Manning).

That is why Hilary Clinton et al are upset. Not because of a few errant cables that appear embarrassing but really tell us nothing we didn’t know, but because the state has perhaps seen the beginning of a phenomenon that could see it cede its role of information ‘gatekeeper’ to an unpredictable, uncontrollable and thoroughly decentred entity. This new monitory function is certainly a significant challenge to the institutions of modern statehood. Whether or not this challenge is a victory for democratic ideals or actually inimical to their very foundations will only be seen in time.