Not Quite a Blog

Like many who work in the area of government transparency and secrecy, I've found the recent WikiLeaks trickle-disclosure to be perplexing. Unlike the popular Twitter meme -- "I don't know if I'm pro-Wikileaks, but I know I'm anti-anti-Wikileaks" -- I think I'm both anti-pro-WikiLeaks and anti-anti-WikiLeaks... sigh.

I'm a moderate on many issues and I've always found arguments for full disclosure to be a bit weak. Often, the thinking in full disclosure circles doesn't go farther than statements like "information wants to be free", which is not the case (and is silly). However, after reading Aaron Brady's commentary on two of Julian Assange's essays, I was struck by two thoughts, both of which are probably no longer original, although I haven't seen them:

First, after reading the Guardian's Simon Jenkins say, "In the future the only secrets will be spoken ones", it struck me that what the US Government is probably now thinking is that it needs something like perfect DRM. That is, the government is struck with a need to share sensitive data in such a way that it best balances the benefits of sharing information and the risk of the sharing being so wide or poorly managed that someone can share that information with people not intended to receive it. Unfortunately, DRM has become a loosing battle in the content industry and now most digital music is shared in non-DRM formats. Also, there is the problem of the "analog hole"; that is to say, eventually this information needs to be displayed to human eyes or ears and it is trivial to capture it at that point for whatever purpose. Of course, there are big differences between the content industry and government and between infringers (of the personal or industrial variety) and spies or the disgruntled. Still, I'm waiting to hear more about why no tripwire was in place that would have prevented the alleged cables leaker from downloading all that material without a superior or auditor asking them, "For what analysis do you need 256k of these things?"

Second, part of the ideal behind WikiLeaks seems to be that openness is necessarily more just. That seems pretty crazy to me in the sense that mechanisms of justice necessarily require some aspects of secrecy. Anyone who has ever gone through the ritual of jury duty in the US will be struck by just how much strategic secrecy there is. There is attorney-client privilege. There is "sidebar" where the judge speaks to attorneys, principals, jurors, etc. in a confidential setting. There are a long list of things that one must disclose in secret to the Court so that the attorneys can see if you are impartial (and it's blind in the sense that they don't know who you are via the form). I don't have much profound here to say other than to emphasize that privacy and confidentiality are not a bad thing and can be a very very good thing for justice. Maybe I'm over-simplifying the case they make here.