Releasing, reporting, or dumping? - The Economist (blog)

MY FREEDOM-LOVING colleague is absolutely right to defend the institution of WikiLeaks, and in case my earlier post was unclear, let me re-emphasise that I think we're all better off having an institution where leakers can anonymously submit important information, have it verified and get it published if it checks out. I certainly don't think Julian Assange should be prosecuted for doing this (his alleged personal behaviour is a separate and irrelevant issue). But I think the current dump of diplomatic cables is basically a poor editorial decision. I think the format of "document dumps" is an attempt to evade the very idea that the organisation is making editorial decisions, to make it merely a neutral throughput for leaked information. But I don't think that works. I think it's clear that the institution of WikiLeaks needs to recognise that it is making editorial decisions, and that those decisions need to take place in a fashion at least as transparent as WikiLeaks would like corporate and governing institutions to be. Basically, I think WikiLeaks needs an ethical review board.

Before getting more deeply into this, let me note a couple of concerns floating around today about WikiLeaks. Matthew Yglesias makes the trenchant point that when Peter King, the representative from New York, absurdly suggests WikiLeaks be labeled a "terrorist organisation", he's demonstrating that this situation has the potential to upset current protections of freedom of the press: "Currently the rule is that it's illegal to be the guy with legal access to classified information who passes it on to outsiders, but once you receive the leak you're free to do what you want with it." If Mr Assange is going to be prosecuted or put on an extra-legal enemies list for doing the same thing the New York Times did with the Pentagon Papers, we're in real trouble.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum notes that while he instinctively found the dumping of diplomatic cables troubling, he had no such immediate qualms about WikiLeaks' forthcoming dump of the internal communications of a major bank. This, in turn, troubles him about his own instincts: what justifies the difference in attitude? One could obviously hazard that markets should theoretically be most efficient if everyone has access to perfect information while no such rule holds true for international relations. But I'm interested to see how Mr Drum thinks this issue out.

Getting back to my colleague's post, I think I'd start with his example of a worthy bit from the document dump:

(D)rawing on the documents made available by WikiLeaks, the ACLU reports that the Bush administration "pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA officers responsible for the kidnapping, extraordinary rendition and torture of German national Khaled El-Masri", a terrorism suspect dumped in Albania once the CIA determined it had nabbed a nobody. I consider kidnapping and torture serious crimes, and I think it's interesting indeed if the United States government applied pressure to foreign governments to ensure complicity in the cover-up of it agents' abuses.

I think this is important too. It's not a bit surprising. And it's probably not going to change anyone's attitudes: people who think the CIA should be doing this sort of thing will be glad America stuck up for its officers, while people like my colleague and myself who think this is scandalous will be angry that the United States government is trying to undermine the rule of law. Nevertheless, it's very important to have documentary substantiation that the diplomatic pressure occurred. I'm glad this particular cable is out there.

My objection, again, is to the idea of releasing this sort of material on a wholesale rather than retail basis. Let's put it this way: some diplomatic cables from United States embassies will have concerned American interventions on behalf of dissidents in authoritarian countries. Release of such cables would endanger any future such American intervention, since authoritarian governments would fear that concessions to secret American requests would eventually embarrass them if the requests were made public. They might endanger the dissidents themselves, or their families. And they might also endanger dissident movements by lending credence to the idea that the movements were American-backed or -controlled. Obviously, releasing this sort of secret cable would be a terrible idea, and I'm sure Julian Assange and WikiLeaks wouldn't do it.

Which is to say that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are making some editorial decisions about what kinds of cables they will and won't release. What is the basis for those editorial decisions? Who makes them? This is the only passage I could find on the WikiLeaks site addressing such concerns:

As the media organisation has grown and developed, WikiLeaks been developing and improving a harm minimisation procedure. We do not censor our news, but from time to time we may remove or significantly delay the publication of some identifying details from original documents to protect life and limb of innocent people.

That's not sufficient. I think WikiLeaks is an important organisation that's doing something the world needs. But like other human-rights and humanitarian organisations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, it needs to lay down some clear, public ethical guidelines about how and why it does what it does. And it needs to bring in a board of directors of people from a wide range of countries, backgrounds and institutions to review the organisation's conduct on ethical and other grounds. For example, here's Human Rights Watch's board of directors. HRW deals with information that's every bit as secret and potentially damaging as the material WikiLeaks gets. But I trust the way they handle it, in part because I know who they are. Who's WikiLeaks? Besides Mr Assange, I don't know, and they're not really telling. Do you know? If so, start a wiki about it.

(Photo credit: AFP)