We spoke with Assange in June 2011, while he was under house arrest in the United Kingdom. Our above-mentioned position aside, we must account for what free-information activists may try to do in the future, and therefore, Assange is a useful starting point. We will not revisit the ongoing debates of today (about which there are already many books and articles), which focus largely on the Western reaction to WikiLeaks, the contents of the cables that have been leaked, how destructive the leaks were and what punishments should await those involved in such activities. Instead, our interest is in the future and what the next phase of free-information movements—beginning with, but not restricted to, the Assange types—may try to achieve or destroy. Over the course of the interview, Assange shared his two basic arguments on this subject, which are related: First, our human civilization is built upon our complete intellectual record; thus the record should be as large as possible to shape our own time and inform future generations. Second, because different actors will always try to destroy or otherwise cover up parts of that shared history out of self-interest, it should be the goal of everyone who seeks and values truth to get as much as possible into the record, to prevent deletions from it, and then to make this record as accessible and searchable as possible for people everywhere.
Assange’s is not a war on secrecy, per se—“There are all sorts of reasons why non-powerful organizations engage in secrecy,” he told us, “and in my view it’s legitimate; they need it because they’re powerless”—but instead it is a fight against the secrecy that shields actions not in the public’s interest. “Why are powerful organizations engaged in secrecy?” he asked rhetorically. The answer he offered is that the plans they have would be opposed if made public, so secrecy floats them to the implementation stage, at which point it’s too late to alter the course effectively. Organizations whose plans won’t incur public opposition don’t carry that burden, so they don’t need to be secretive, he added. As these two types of organizations battle, the one with genuine public support will eventually come out on top, Assange said. Releasing information, then, “is positive to those engaged in acts which the public supports and negative to those engaged in acts the public doesn’t support.”
As to the charge that those secretive organizations can simply take their operations off-line and avoid unwelcome disclosure, Assange is confident in his movement’s ability to prevent this. Not a possibility, he said; serious organizations will always leave a paper trail. By definition, he explained, “systematic injustice is going to have to involve a lot of people.” Not every participant will have full access to the plans, but each will have to know something in order to do his job. “If you take your information off paper, if you take it outside the electronic or physical paper trail, institutions decay,” he said. “That’s why all organizations have rigorous paper trails for the instructions from the leadership.” Paper trails ensure that instructions are carried out properly; therefore, as Assange said, “if they internally balkanize so that information can’t be leaked, there’s a tremendous cost to the organizational efficiency of doing that.” And inefficient organizations mean less powerful ones.
Openness, on the other hand, introduces new challenges for this movement of truth-seekers, from Assange’s perspective. “When things become more open, then they start to become more complex, because people start hiding what they’re doing—their bad behavior—through complexity,” he said. He pointed to bureaucratic doublespeak and the offshore financial sector as clear examples. These systems are technically open, he said, but in fact are impenetrable; they are hard to attack but even harder to use efficiently. Obfuscation at this level, where the complexity is legal but still covering something up, is a much more difficult problem to solve than straightforward censorship.
Unfortunately, people like Assange and organizations like WikiLeaks will be well placed to take advantage of some of the changes in the next decade. And even supporters of their work are faced with difficult questions about the methods and implications of online disclosures, particularly as we look beyond the case study of WikiLeaks and into the future. One of the most difficult is the question of discretionary power: Who gets to decide what information is suitable for release, and what must be redacted, even temporarily? Why is it Julian Assange, specifically, who gets to decide what information is relevant to the public interest? And what happens if the person who makes such decisions is willing to accept indisputable harm to innocents as a consequence of his disclosures? Most people would agree that some level of supervision is necessary for any whistle-blowing platforms to serve a positive role in society, but there is no guarantee that supervision will be there (a glance at the recklessness of hackers3 who publish others’ personal information online in bulk confirms this).
If there is a central body facilitating the release of information, someone or some group of people, with their own ideas and biases, must be making those decisions. So long as humans, and not computers, are running things in our world, we will face these questions of judgment, no matter how transparent or technically sound the platforms are.
Looking ahead, some people might assume that the growth of connectivity around the world will spur a proliferation of WikiLeaks-like platforms. With more users and more classified or confidential information online, the argument goes, dozens of smaller secret-publishing platforms will emerge to meet the increase in supply and demand. A compelling and frightening idea, but wrong. There are natural barriers to growth in the field of whistle-blowing websites, including exogenous factors that limit the number of platforms that can successfully coexist. Regardless of what one thinks of WikiLeaks, consider all the things it needed in order to become a known, global brand: more than one geopolitically relevant large-scale leak to grab international attention; a track record of leaks to show commitment to the cause, to generate public trust and to give incentives to other potential leakers by demonstrating WikiLeaks’ ability to protect them; a charismatic figurehead who could embody the organization and serve as its lightning rod, as Assange called himself; a constant upload of new leaks (often in bulk) to remain relevant in the public eye; and, not least, a broadly distributed and technically sophisticated digital platform for leakers, organization staff and the public to handle the leaked materials (while all remaining anonymous to one another) that could evade shutdown by authorities in multiple countries. It is very difficult to build such an intricate and responsive system, both technically and because the value of most components depends on the capabilities of others. (What good is a sophisticated platform without motivated leakers, or a set of valuable secrets without the system to discretely process and disseminate them?) The balance struck by WikiLeaks between public interest, private disclosure and technical protections took years to reach, so it is hard to imagine future upstarts, offshoots or rivals building an equivalent platform and brand much faster than they could—particularly now that authorities around the world are attuned to the threat such organizations pose.
Moreover, even if new organizations managed to build such platforms, it is highly unlikely that the world could support more than a handful at any given time. There are a few reasons for this. First, even the juiciest disclosures require a subsequent media cycle in order to have impact. If the landscape of secret-spilling websites became too decentralized, media outlets would find it difficult to keep track of these sites and their leaks, and to gauge their trustworthiness as sources. Second, leakers will naturally coalesce around organizations that they believe will generate maximum impact for their disclosures while providing them with the maximum amount of protection. These websites can compete for leakers, with promises of ever better publicity and anonymity, but it’s only logical that a potential whistle-blower would look for successful examples and follow the lead of other leakers before him. What source would risk his chance, even his life, on an untested group? And organizations that cannot consistently attract high-level leaks will lose attention and funding, slowly but surely atrophying in the process. Assange described this dynamic from his organization’s perspective as a positive one, providing a check on WikiLeaks as surely as it kept them in business. “Sources speak with their feet,” he said. “We’re disciplined by market forces.”