Politics Night: Wikileaks

We had our third politics night on Tuesday (11/30/2010). We discussed Wikileaks. I will summarize my position. Others can add theirs in the comments if they so choose.

Let me start by saying two things about state secrets that do not directly relate to Wikileaks. First, I think people in government abuse state secrets privileges (see my post on Claim of Privilege). So I am not a zealot on protecting classified documents. And related to that, I think there can be really important instances when leaked documents tell the public what they need to know but the government has been hiding from them.

Now, as to Wikileaks, I don't think that this last release was necessary nor has it been helpful at all. As many commentators have already said, the release was gossip and nothing more. And that gossip hasn't told the public anything useful, but it has potentially hurt our ability to work with partners like Russia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

Governments should be able to talk privately. Of course, in the end, their decisions, and the information that went into making those decisions should be made public. But we don't need to know all private conversations.

I don't remember the previous releases too well, except that in general they didn't say a whole lot that we didn't already know. I think there were certain events that we didn't know about, but overall, there didn't seem to be a message that the government was hiding that came out in the releases.

I believe that the reason the Wikileaks information hasn't been that helpful in general stems from Julian Assange's motives. If we are to believe him, his goal is to make everything government does public. If we are to believe others, he just wants to embarrass the US. Either way, these intentions have lead, and will continue to lead to, unedited information dumps that are mostly useless but sometimes harmful.

When someone's intention is to highlight wrongdoing or bad decision-making, then we are likely to get information that furthers those goals. But when one's motives come from an absurd notion about democracy, or just a hatred of the US, then we will get a lot of information that is not helpful for the public to know and in some cases is harmful.

Update:
One of the Politics Night faithful pointed me to a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Steven Aftergood on Democracy Now. Also, so that Julian Assange can speak for himself, here is a link to some of the interviews with him recently.