WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a more general pattern. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
WikiLeaks affects one of the key tensions in democracies: the government needs to be able to keep secrets, but citizens need to know what is being done in our name. These requirements are fundamental and incompatible; like the trade-offs between privacy and security, or liberty and equality, different countries in different eras find different ways to negotiate those competing needs.
In the case of state secrets v citizen oversight, however, there is one constant risk: since deciding what is a secret is itself a secret, there is always a risk that the government will simply hide an increasing amount of material of public concern. One response to this risk is the leaker, someone who believes that key elements of political life are being wrongly kept from public view, and who circulates that material on his or her own.
Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn't just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.
This transformation is under-appreciated. The press often covers WikiLeaks as a series of unfortunate events, one crisis or scandal after another. And Julian Assange, of course, is catnip – brilliant, opinionated, a monocle and a Persian cat away from looking like a Bond villain. The press has covered him as dutifully as any movie star, while paying too little attention to what his invention means about the wider world.
To understand the system WikiLeaks is disrupting, it helps to focus on a key moment of its formation. In 1946, the English-speaking Allies – the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – decided that the pooling of their intelligence efforts set up during the conflict was too useful to end, even though the war had. The result, the blandly named UKUSA Agreement, was in the main a way for those governments to share foreign intelligence with each other.
The pact, however, did have one important domestic effect. It was illegal for those governments to spy on their own citizens. It was not, however, illegal for them to spy on each others' citizens. The agreement provided means for sharing the resulting observations without violating domestic laws.
For half a century, from 1946 to 2005, this use of transnational networks to get around national controls was asymmetric: governments could use this technique to surveil citizens, but not vice-versa. In 2006, WikiLeaks launched, holding out the possibility of evening up the odds, however slightly, in favour of the citizens. For the first three years of its existence, this change was more potential than actual, but in 2010, with the release of the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan war logs, and, most significantly, the US embassy cables, increased oversight of the state by citizens became real.
Limits on such leaking aren't just about threats to the leaker. There are also threats to the publishers. Sometimes the threats are formal; the UK has an Official Secrets Act. Sometimes they are informal; the US press is held in partial check by their need for long-term co-operation with the government. So long as a leak had to appear in one country's press to affect that country's politics, the relationship between the state and the press was contained by national borders.
Until WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down.
WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.
WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading. Al-Jazeera and the Guardian created a transnational network to release the Palestine papers, without using WikiLeaks as an intermediary, and Daniel Domscheit-Berg is in the process of launching OpenLeaks, which will bring WikiLeaks-like capability to any publisher that wants it. It is possible to imagine that secrets from Moscow, Rome or Johannesburg will be routed through Iceland, Costa Rica, or even a transnational network of servers volunteered by private citizens.
The state will fight back, of course. They will improve their controls on secrets, raise surveillance and punishment of possible leakers, try to negotiate multilateral media controls. But even then, the net change is likely to be advantageous to the leakers – less free than today, perhaps, but more free than prior to 2006. Assange has claimed, when the history of statecraft of the era is written, that it will be divided into pre- and post-WikiLeaks periods. This claim is grandiose and premature; it is not, however, obviously wrong.
Clay Shirky @'The Guardian'
