Wikidribbles

I've been struggling to reach an opinion on the Wikileaks issue since it erupted.

On the one hand, I am firmly in favour of openness in government, and firmly against many of the abuses that Wikileaks and others have uncovered.  If secrecy allows governments to engage in such abuses away from the watchful (?) eye of the voters, then disclosure is good, surely?  It has also amused me to see the governments who assured us that if we had nothing to hide, then we had nothing to fear from disclosure, suddenly demonstrating that they seem to have something to hide.

On the other hand, I do accept that some information does need to be kept secret, and that doing so is in all our interests.  Who is this Assange person to assess this, I wonder?  I also worry that the whole affair is developing into a personality cult around Assange, and wonder whether the ultimate aim is to knock down the unnecessary curtains around abuse or build up the podium under Assange?

But David Allen Green has clarified it a little for me.  He has the same dilemma.  On the one hand:

Transparency in diplomatic and governmental matters is important, for behind the cloak of secrecy and plausible deniability can lie malice, selfishness and incompetence. Open access to reliable information enables us to participate effectively in a democratic society: in particular, voters can get beyond the self-serving spin of politicians and media outlets. In the wise words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest jurists in American history, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

...but nevertheless:

But transparency is not the only liberal value. There are others, and these are important, too.

For example, there is the value of legitimacy: those who wield power in the public interest should normally have some democratic mandate or accountability.

However, no one has voted for WikiLeaks, nor does it have any form of democratic supervision. Indeed, it is accountable to no one at all. One may think that this is a good thing: that with such absolute autonomy WikiLeaks can do things that it otherwise might not be able to do. One could even take comfort that WikiLeaks represents the "good guys" and is "doing the right thing".

There it is; there is the source of my unease.  It is an unease that flows form the process, not the disclosures themselves.  It is that Wikileaks has set itself up and is trying very hard to operate in a way that cannot be overseen by law.

This is wrong.  This is an issue in which a fine balance needs to be struck, between the benefits of disclosure and its cleansing effect on the activities of governments, and the harm that could flow from uninhibited disclosure.  We have institutions, independent of government, which are set up with the express remit of reaching such decisions; they are called Courts.

That is where this matter should be taken; there should be an immunity law allowing any official or their proxy in possession of information to take it, anonymously, to a Court and apply for it to be disclosed.  If the information is above a threshold of triviality, then the administration should be invited to explain why the information should be withheld.  The Court should then be tasked with looking critically at the administration response, rejecting it unless clearly justified, and be given the power to grant immunity to the official allowing him to publish (perhaps in a redacted form).

(Yes, yes, none of us can use the Courts because it is too scary and expensive.  But that is another argument, one for reforming our Court system.)

In this way, Wikileaks could operate within the law, and be subject to an oversight that would give it legitemacy.