Editorial: A Wiki Wiki World Without Secrets

When the non-profit media site Wiki Leaks published a trove of State Department cables this week, it raised a great deal of questions regarding intelligence in the digital age. The chance for people with access to sensitive information to leak it has always existed. It is the platforms available to disseminate that information that have changed.

If you know a secret and you tell me, I may tell someone else. They might be able to profit from that information, they might not. They may pass it on. Information is usually carried in a leaky bucket, meaning not the same amount of truth arrives at the next destination. This is why without a platform from which to broadcast information, it quickly becomes rumor.

In the past, there were a limited number of vehicles in terms of getting information out on a national or world-wide scale and they all had multiple levels of gatekeepers. If a whistleblower wanted to tell the world of a wrongdoing, he could go to the press – a major newspaper like the Washington Post, a magazine like Time, or the people at one of the network's nightly news broadcasts. Editors, producers, publishers and often even the corporate executives at their parent companies controlled whether or not the story ran or in which light it was cast.

In the Internet age, that has all changed – and now it is changing even more rapidly. Sites have long existed where activists could chat, post and blog. Often they speculated, but if they were to get their hands on proof of whatever they were arguing, they could post it on their domain for the entire world to see – provided the world knew it was there.

What has changed in the last few years is the vehicles from which people communicate and their ability to rapidly link large groups of like-minded individuals to that information. An article gets published at a small site, but then a reader posts it to their Facebook page where all of their friends see it, who pass it to their friends and so forth. Someone uploads video commentary to Youtube, someone tweets the link.

Anything that is outrageous enough to inspire someone to pass it on can become intensely viral. In a matter of hours, a million people might get that information. The Internet, in many ways, levels the playing field. It gives ordinary people the power to influence the information that the public has access to in a way once limited to a few powerful individuals, multinational corporations and major governments. When you remove the gatekeepers, the corporate interests, and in some cases the sound judgment, both good and bad things happen.

In a world that is anything short of Utopian, there will always be a need for secrecy, especially in matters of state, and leaking certain information can be both irresponsible and dangerous. But for too long, the standards of what is acceptable in terms of government policy and the trade-off of personal liberties in exchange for protection (as well as the platform offered for matters of whistleblowing on either state or corporate misdeeds) have not been as accessible as a just society would demand.

In terms of safety, Americans have long been willing to accept a certain trade off as necessary to national security. When that trade off surpasses their collective tolerance, however, it is not up to the government, who serves at the will of the people, to decide whether the taxpayers have a right to know what is being perpetrated on their behalf. I think officials should recognize that if they stay within those boundaries there exists no such market for most leaks, because they do not inspire the requisite outrage.

In that sense, I am grateful for the web as an alternative to state and corporately influenced outlets and hope it remains so. A world without secrets can be a dangerous place, but a world in which critical information is heavily guarded and then distributed through a filter that distorts its inhabitant's understanding of the very nature of society is no substitute, for it will produce ignorant children in the body of adults, who need only to be pacified or distracted while a small minority determines their fate.

Related Article: What is a Wiki Leak