Ethics: WikiLeaks

A tremendous amount (over 250,000) diplomatic cables were turned over to WikiLeaks for publication on the Internet. Although only about 10% of them are classified as secret or something similar, they contain a tremendously wide array of sometimes sensitive and sometimes just interesting information about US diplomacy. Reactions have ranged from support of Julian Assange’s (WikiLeaks’s founder) Free Speech rights or even speculation that something like WikiLeaks is useful enough to stop (or have stopped) something like 9/11 to calls for his assassination as a spy undermining America’s interests in stopping terrorism. We’ll talk about the ethical implications of whistle-blowing, the Internet, diplomacy, and publishing stolen materials.

Show Prep is below links.

Links:
WikiLeaks (Wikipedia [no connection])
WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables release (Wikipedia)
Wikileaks and 9/11: What if? (LAT)
How much trouble is Julan Assange in? (CSM)
The real point of the Wikileaks (CSM)
Wikileaks 101: Five questions answered (CSM)
Wikileaks wakeup call (Jonah Goldberg)
Attack by Wikileaks (WSJ)
WikiLeaks threatens doomsday file if blocked (NY Post)
What does Julian Assange want? (Guardian)
Hundreds of WikiLeaks mirror sites appear (NYT)
Good gossip, and no harm done to US (NYT)
Julian Assange, information anarchist (WSJ)
New obstacles for WikiLeaks and founder (NYT)
The big American leak (Thomas Friedman)
Why Iran loves WikiLeaks (NYT)
What if the secrets stayed secret (NYT)
NYT then and now (Powerline)
NYT on Climategate 11/2009 (NYT)
NYT on Wikileaks 11/2010 (NYT)

Show Prep:
On WikiLeaks
Founded in 2006
Loads of journalistic awards
o 2009 Amnesty International for Kenyan killings
o 2008 Economist Magazine Index on Censorship new media award
Past leaks
o Scientology
o Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email contents
o Guantanamo Bay SOP manual
o British National Party membership, including police, barre3d from membership. Far right group.
o UN internal reports
o Contributors to Norm Coleman campaign
o East Anglia ClimateGate documents
o Lists of national censorship lists of Internet sites.
o Bilderberg Group reports from 1955-1980
o Iranian nuclear accident, Stuxnet virus
o Internal report by British Trafigura on toxic dumping in Africa, the Minton Report
o Joint Services Protocol 440, British Ministry of Defense plans for preventing internal leaks.
o NSA capture of pager messages sent on 9/11
o US Intelligence report on WikiLeaks
o US Baghdad airstrike video killing 12 civilians
o Afghanistan war documents 92,000
o Iraq War Logs, 400,000 documents, largest diplomatic release ever.
Leak protocols
o Some redaction to protect people who might be harmed.
o 15,000 documents on Afghan war withheld for this reason
Defense
o Has released a massive encrypted file which it claims contains unredacted documents of all sorts which he will give out the key to if detained or if WikiLeaks is pulled entirely off the Internet.
Purpose
o The United States is a conspiratorial state, and stopping us from effectively sharing information within the state apparatus is his goal.
o Balkanization as a form of defense against leaks.
o This will make the US government dumber, slower, and smaller.
o Waging a kind of information war against the US in an effort to reduce or cripple our “authoritarian conspiracy” of a government from doing what it wants.

Questions
Should vendors deny supplies/webhosting to them?
----Indirect censorship
----Amazon, EveryDNS, PayPal
He has released information which he would not wish released about himself.
Is it a crime?
Do you want Julian Assange sitting in the position of needing to be persuaded to not publish things by the US Government
Can America successfully extradite him from wherever he is anyhow?
Who has the burden of proof that something should be classified?
To whom is Assange obligated to be loyal?
Who should be blamed?
----Private Manning
----Julian Assange
----The Internet
----Anyone who assists him
----The people who granted Manning his access/security
----News media
Not about whistleblowing
----No or very few criminal activities are involved here.

Implications
Contents
o Private persons’ information, Social Security Numbers
o US ambassadors to UN ordered to spy on other delegations by Hillary Clinton
o Saudis want Iran decapitated
o Turkey’s leader is a modern-day Pharaoh.
Impact
o Some harm
o Diplomacy
o Secretary of Defense Gates has said it’s no big deal.
§ Awkward, embarrassing, fairly modest impact on USFP
o Won’t be able to be trusted by other government negotiators.
Support
o If the American government were more honest, this wouldn’t be necessary
o Julian Assange is quoted as saying, "Of course, abusive, Titanic organizations, when exposed, grasp at all sorts of ridiculous straws to try and distract the public from the true nature of the abuse."
o They don’t really say anything everybody didn’t already suspect or believe
----Suspect and know are different.
----Plausible deniability.
o It’s the single most primary job of journalists to find and reveal information that centers of power prefer to remain secret.
o Would you as a reader of news rather trust yourself with the information or someone else to hold it for you?
Opposition
o Hurting American war and diplomacy efforts
o Making government officials seem duplicitous
----Is this a surprise in diplomacy?
o No point in much of what it discloses
o Voyeurism, more than anything.
o Governments require secrecy to do diplomacy
o Hillary Clinton:
----"This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy; it is an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conventions and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity."
Criticism
o Amnesty International, NYT, and Reporters Without Borders have said they were wrong for endangering Afghan sources
o According to the New York Times, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders criticized WikiLeaks for what they saw as risking people’s lives by identifying Afghans acting as informers. A Taliban spokesman said that the Taliban had formed a nine-member "commission" to review the documents "to find about people who are spying." He said the Taliban had a "wanted" list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided, stating "after the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people.”
o His use of freedom undermines the stability and ability of the very free countries whose liberty he is exploiting.

Other scenarios
9/11
o There is good reason to believe that WikiLeaks could have helped prevent 9/11
o FBI failed to properly pursue Zaccharias Moussaoui, despite pleas from Special Agent Harry Samit that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.”
o Air Marshall Bogdan Dzakovic was hired to probe airport security found repeatedly that his team could easily kill large numbers of people, but his report was ignored, buried, and he was eventually demoted severely.
ClimateGate last year
o NYT wouldn’t publish those because illegally obtained and private.
Pentagon Papers
o Daniel Ellsberg has defended WikiLeaks aggressively
Evidence after the fact
o Pearl Harbor

Values involved
Free speech
Equality
Where does power reside
Distrust of official coordinated power/control
Democracy
Violations of privacy
Disclosures that harm national security
Who is doing it and why?
How would you feel if it had been done to another country, perhaps one of our enemies?
Ability to conduct diplomacy
Inefficiencies of bureaucracy
Legality of the information leak in the first place