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.