Clay Shirky on how Wikileaks has changed and transnationalized democracy

WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.

Excerpted from Clay Shirky’s editorial in the Guardian:

“WikiLeaks affects one of the key tensions in democracies: the government needs to be able to keep secrets, but citizens need to know what is being done in our name. These requirements are fundamental and incompatible; like the trade-offs between privacy and security, or liberty and equality, different countries in different eras find different ways to negotiate those competing needs.

In the case of state secrets v citizen oversight, however, there is one constant risk: since deciding what is a secret is itself a secret, there is always a risk that the government will simply hide an increasing amount of material of public concern. One response to this risk is the leaker, someone who believes that key elements of political life are being wrongly kept from public view, and who circulates that material on his or her own.

Because this tension between governments and leakers is so important, and because WikiLeaks so dramatically helps leakers, it isn’t just a new entrant in the existing media landscape. Its arrival creates a new landscape.

This transformation is under-appreciated.

in 2010, with the release of the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan war logs, and, most significantly, the US embassy cables, increased oversight of the state by citizens became real.

Limits on such leaking aren’t just about threats to the leaker. There are also threats to the publishers. Sometimes the threats are formal; the UK has an Official Secrets Act. Sometimes they are informal; the US press is held in partial check by their need for long-term co-operation with the government. So long as a leak had to appear in one country’s press to affect that country’s politics, the relationship between the state and the press was contained by national borders.

Until WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down.

WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.”

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