THINQon : Wikileaks + ethics

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Robert Percy, Tired but waking up more everyday

Wikileaks + ethics

Latest Post: October 28, 2010 at 6:08 PM

2 followers

I wonder what everyone's opinion on the wikileaks great big leak from last weekend is. For those who don't know, wikileaks is a website operating under mysterious and law-circumventing ways that sets about gathering secret government information and documents and then posts them online. It publishes the documents unchanged and anonymously. Since being launched in 2007 it has published more than 1 million classified documents from countries and governments and organizations and people from all over the world.

For the most part until this april wikileaks was a marginalized website with slight readership and voice. But then they released a video that was leaked to them by a member of the US army. The video showed footage of US helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that was directed at a group of men largely unarmed and including journalists and children.

Then, this past week, wikileaks leaked 92,000 military documents regarding the war in Afghanistan from the period 2004-2009. Actually, to be more accurate only 70,000 of the documents were released. The rest wikileaks said were not to be released and remain secret because people's lives and military and war integrity are dependent on it. The documents released set about giving a clearer picture of the current state of the Afghan war. They report on increased Taliban attacks, civilian deaths, and a more important role by Pakistan in aiding of the insurgency. But also many of the documents are of course more mundane bureaucratic pieces that you imagine to find in a pile of 70,000.

My question is about the ethics of this all. Is it right that wikileaks should publish anonymously leaked information that can very well have unknown implications for peoples and governments all over the world? My own thinking is yes, that it's always better for the information to get out there especially because in there mission statement they make a point of not releasing documents thought to endanger lives. But who are these people to decide? Who is in this international subversive team set out to bring truth to a wildly misled or uninformed public and how do we know if we can trust them?

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Linda OReilly

in "Wiki-Leaks a hero or just irrsesponsible?"

(The Living Room)

Reply to:

Mark Opal

August 5, 2010 at 1:16 AM

12 followers

It's obviously a tricky question. How can civilians decide the significance of information? It's certainly possible that a small oversight can leave someone dead halfway across the world. It's a lot to take on one's conscious. Information, not being so tangible, is something very liable to take on a life of its own. So maybe as the weeks go on we'll learn that the release of one small military receipt has left a little girl noseless a deserted region whose name we can't pronounce.

But what I am curious about is how this story this will read generations down the line. We live in a digital age. A website like this was only a matter of time. And though there is something known as digital decay, it will be a long time before records like this are erased. I think life is going to get a lot more tedious for the historians among us. There is just so much filth to sift through. It was decided earlier this spring that all the billions of twitter messages written while in line at starbucks were to be entered into the Library of Congress. Idea being that no single twitter is all that significant but put together the mass of them will be strong indication of public sentiment. So if anything maybe these wikileaks will inspire future interpretations of the age we live in.

As for the moment though I believe fully in the disclosure of information and back fully the mission statement of wikileaks. I only wish that people cared. In both major leak cases, the videos and the war records, the news story raced around the internet over two days and was then promptly dropped from every news service. The world needs journalism like wikileaks because if it was up to the major media conglomerates no information would make it to the public unless it pays. And of course wikileaks is free and their organization operates only from the random influx of donations. This keeps them honest in a system that is hardly trustworthy. They give the primary sources in their entirety and smartly keep their commentary to the side. When you read their site you know exactly what is objective and what is subjective.

Who do you turn to for reliable news these days? I generally read new york times daily but it's so easy I feel guilty about it. You're naive if you don't know all news is biased. And so we should be grateful for wikileaks if only because it's a reminder where all news origins from. What we can see with them is the process of fine journalism and they are the minimalists who don't bother with fluff. The only issue of course is that fluff sells and more money brings more readers and no money means your news, your leaks, become old-news right away.

Reply to: or

Robert Percy, Tired but waking up more everyday

August 12, 2010 at 9:21 PM

2 followers

What I find most disturbing about the wikileaks recent release of war documents is how quickly it has been forgotten. How quickly it has been pushed to the far background noise of the media. People should be outraged. The whole world should be outraged. Those documents are proof of just how badly we ignored a country. And now we are ignoring that ignoring.
Iraq Iraq Iraq. What was that first country we were waging a war in again? Oh yeah...about that.

These war documents show civilian casualties, rising foreign support for the Taliban, greater Pakistani involvement with Al Qaeda, as well as greater violence. Really, most of us have known about the grim realities of Afghanistan for awhile. At least since last year when the administration publicly changed their Afghani strategy. But still, we should feel heinously bad about ourselves. Almost a decade ago we entered a country promising to rid it of all the forces that existed there working against the people. We are going to help you we said. Terrorism is going to be wiped from your lands. We've only made it worse.

These documents, though maybe in reality hardly game-changing, should be final proof to the futility of a war on terrorism. And what effect did this leak have? Hardly any. It makes me cynical and sure that nothing can wake us up as an entire nation to the atrocities we've committed over there. We just don't care.

There is no way the war on terrorism could ever have succeeded unless we had somehow killed or captured every single cog in the entire machine. From Bin Laden at the top to every bottom cell. Does that sound possible to anyone? Wikileaks didn't release war logs, they released a trove of red tape, they released the Pentagon's daily bureaucratic jungle.

It's so silly that here at home it should feel like we're in peacetime and yet we've been fighting for almost ten years now.

Reply to: or

Jim Pauley, "Trying sir"

In response to Robert Percy

August 25, 2010 at 5:22 PM

1 follower

Terrorism isn’t an enemy that can be defeated, it’s simply a tactic in an overall strategy intended to sap an opponent’s will to fight. Terrorism is typically used in asymmetric conflicts where one side has a decided material advantage over another. Material advantage exists where there isn’t a common valuation between combatants of the materials used to wage war or there isn’t a common valuation of the rewards for engaging in war. For example, certain societies value human life more than others. Other societies value ideas more than material goods. Imbalance in the perceived costs and/or rewards of conflict make one agent’s ‘terrorism’ another agent’s ‘winning strategy’.

I assert that as long as violent conflict exists the tactic of terrorism will be exploited. It’s naïve of one party in a violent conflict to expect conformance to set of rules governing behavior of the conflicted parties. This naivety seems to me to be a distinctly western affectation, borne out in large part by western society’s almost religious belief in using technology to control the battlefield. It’s undeniable in warfare that technology floats all boats but terrorism as tactic is purely psychological in nature and therefore technology agnostic.

So the question becomes, not how can we win the war on terrorism. Rather the question becomes how can we close the gap between those that have and those that have-not? Violence is (IMO) only a particularly ‘energetic’ thermodynamic process imposing equilibrium between the haves and the have-nots (think Dr Suess’ Sneetches <g>). If we minimize the differences we minimize the potential energy of the processes that seek to balance those differences.

I talk about closing the gaps because that’s the only counter-terrorism (CT) strategy recognized to be effective in the long term. Education is the key to closing these gaps. For only through education can both sides communicate their needs and begin to understand there are more than binary alternatives (fight/flight) to conflict resolution. Until the populace is educated to the root causes of terrorism politicians will exploit this ignorance to perpetuate violent rather than social solutions.