Christian Caryl is the Washington Chief Editor for CIA shell company, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, so it should come as no surprise that he finds that wikileaks lacks "an adequate reason for exposing official secrets", by which obviously he means that wikileaks has not sought to make a mock moral case for its document dump somehow acting to the betterment of the United States. Bear this in mind. It is the fundamental, underlying principle of his entire essay.
One of the truest truisms of the craft of writing is that if your entire essay can be summarized as "no," then it is probably not worth writing.
One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result.Damage of various kinds? That's milquetoast even by the standards of a government stooge. Will the moon fall into the Pacific Ocean, causing the extinction of all life on earth? We do not know, and we may be dead before it happens. He makes a bizarre and otiose claim that wikileaks front man Julian Assange is incapable of responding to the charges that opened secrets will proximately cause human deaths, and then he prints Assange's response to precisely those charges:
(For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.)So, he is "unable to discuss these very real dangers" because he dismisses the notion that they are very real. He says the accusation isn't creditable, and the accuser mumbles that he isn't being specific.
And then we move on to territory so familiar, so worn, so rife with cliché that I am surprised even the fuddy New York Review of Books would print it, even on a blog.
One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, does the Internet distribution of official secrets change the rules of the game.Oh, man, paging Tom Friedman: someone has stolen your patented formula. The rules of what game? The ability of teenagers to embarrass themselves in front of a modestly larger audience than their own high school (but billions? Guurrrrll) is comparable to "the distribution of official secrets" how, exactly? What is the object and what is the vehicle in this bizarre metaphor. Is the world's preeminent military hegemon the oversharing sixteen-year-old, or is Daddy's little girl nuclear tipped, if you know whaddahmean? It's impossible to take this kind of writing as anything but a joke, because it labors so thoroughly to maintain a pretense that some delicate moral line is being crossed, that the operation of empires is fraught as the sexual reputation of an adolescent girl. That is plainly preposterous. Even if you grant the premise that wikileaks is destructive, heedless, and incoherent, it remains an absurd and offensive comparison.
Caryl, like pretty much every other American, um, journalist, has got the ethical onus exactly backwards.
The Internet has brought countless benefits to mankind, but, as we see now, it also creates incalculable potential for mischief: it amplifies the threats of schoolyard bullies, empowers terrorists and fringe groups, and opens up huge new spaces to technologically savvy criminals. Now that data can be shared, linked, and exploited with near-instantaneous ease, the risks entailed by the publication of information mushroom out of all recognition; there is simply no way that any editor, however well-meaning, can make an informed judgment about the potential repercussions entailed by the release of vast amounts of confidential data of this sort. But this is where we are, and I wonder whether preaching restraint can have much effect. The technology has outpaced the ethics, and I wonder whether the ethics can ever catch up again.Oh, yes, yes. On the other hand, the Internet has not yet, to my knowledge, killed a few hundred thousand Muslims, deposed a couple of governments in order to establish expatriate kleptocracies, and launched secret wars throughout the gulf and East Africa. Any effort in contravention of the government that engages in such acts is inherently more ethical than that government and its acts. And notice too that embedded in the argument against document-dumping is an argument against secret-sharing of any kind. It's right there in plain sight. "There is simply no way that any editor, however well-meaning . . ." Since we cannot determine whether what the government keeps secret is good or bad (for the government) due to the sheer volume of additional secrets to which we are not yet privy, we should therefore remain silent, knowing not whereof we speak.
