Pooh's Think

In a recent article for Slate,  Farhad Manjoo offers a critical look at WikiLeaks through the lens of the release of Afghanistan war logs. Manjoo asks, “Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity?”.  With total anonymity of sources, which means that even WikiLeaks does not know and cannot know the sources of the leaks it provides, WikiLeaks has become “an opaque, insular organization” and has “shrouded itself in secrecy.”  As if the pejorative ‘insular’ and ‘shrouded’ and ‘secrecy’ were not enough, this is “a problem” Manjoo informs us, since “most whistle-blowers” have “some sort of agenda” and this agenda is “part of the story” and “could provide valuable context.”  Manjoo concludes, “would many leakers balk if WikiLeaks began asking them simple questions? Let me offer a few suggestions: Who are you, how did you find this document, and why are you leaking it now?”

As one who has been on the WikiLeak side of this kind of criticism (an experience originating a mild theme for my book in progress), I felt compelled to offer a reply.  I have not in the past spent much time on the political.  Perhaps I am finally getting drawn in, or perhaps it is not just politics at stake here. This issue regards our appreciation, or lack thereof, for the endearing role totalitarianism has played through human history, particularly with respect to the gruesomely attained discovery of that still globally rare and precious form of life we call freedom.  Freedom to think, freedom to know, freedom to talk, freedom to act.  Freedom from unknown microphones in one’s bedside phone and freedom from imprisonment and torture for failure to whoop it up for the local big-mouthed pathological monomaniac.  I speak of a Freedom not only for the guru or the state sponsored saint or the patriarch or the dear leader or all those deluded murderous tyrants we apparently cannot live without. I speak of a Freedom of the human mammal, which, by categorical definition, possesses some extent of at least a rough similarity to my own consciousness, emotions, and nervous system.

In answer to Manjoo’s question then—and I am glad he asks it—‘NO’, I do not think many leakers would “balk.”  They after all are in a position of simply trying to find a way to “balk” about their own immediate affiliations and social ties and daily life routines without the ramifications of, on the mild end of the whipping stick, the fine-tuned mechanisms of discrimination, shunning, ridicule, shame, and psychological torture.  These leakers would hardly have the arrogance, motivation, emotional energy, or concern to “balk” at WikiLeak for asking such questions.  These would-be leakers would simply not leak, but go on, oppressed by their knowledge of the truth that powerful people have so far succeeded in keeping under wraps.  The suggestion that “most whistle-blowers” have some “sort of agenda” is an insult to all those men and women who have suffered for the cause of truth.  I do hope that Manjoo’s easy dismissal of this possibility from even a quick reference does not reflect his own inability to empathize with this kind of “agenda”.  As WikiLeak alleges, globally, “Whistleblowers account for around half of all exposures of fraud.”  It is hard to imagine that this important source of truth in the world is primarily guided by private ambitions or more neutral selfish drives like “agendas”, irrelevant if not counter to, the knowledge of the truth.

As for the charge of insularity and secrecy:  How does this smear—that is all it can be, right or wrong: a smear apt to cue strong emotions—fall even near the argumentative crux?  The military needs a mechanism to secure some information.  In this case, this mechanism failed. This was only ‘secret’ information though. So far, we have seen no ‘top secret’ information.  We have laws about leaking this information.  The leaker still stands the risk of discovery and prosecution according to law and under the protections of the U.S. Constitution—although the leaker is currently ‘innocent’ and will remain so until declared guilty by someone other than Obama and James Jones—while Wikileaks has established itself even more as a safe source to leak important information from within oppressive regimes throughout the world.

Manjoo stays clear of this more sticky point of law and the peculiar power of the executive branch and military to the more interesting epistemological point: how do we know? How do we know why the documents were leaked, or if these are all the relevant documents or if the documents have been tampered?  But the argument here is mangled.  Manjoo confuses two kinds of evidence: the evidence of primary documents and the evidence of testimony.  Understanding the source indeed will provide narrative context and such context is always “helpful”—as well as entertaining—but after 90,000 of official military documents have been presented to the court of public opinion, such “helpfulness” diminishes up an asymptotic curve.  The media has been concerned about what these documents say, with the interpretive context well secured over the fact that they do not know who leaked, why, if these are all the documents and, prima facie, if they have been tampered. And alternatively, the government simply wants the leaker’s head on a stick, regardless of who he is and why he leaked the information.  Manjoo has therefore simply played into the hands of the authoritarian and helped weaken our always tentative grasp on freedom.

I leave you with Wikileak’s nailing of the epistemological point:

WikiLeaks believes that best way to truly determine if a story is authentic, is not just our expertise, but to provide the full source document to the broader community – and particularly the community of interest around the document. So for example, let’s say a WikiLeaks’ document reveals human rights abuses and it is purportedly from a regional Chinese government. Some of the best people to analyze the document’s veracity are the local dissident community, human rights groups and regional experts (such as academics). They may be particularly interested in this sort of document. But of course WikiLeaks will be open for anyone to comment.

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