Excerpted from a new book by Micah Sifry:
Book: Micah Sifry. WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. ORBooks, 2011
“Here’s why the anti-WikiLeaks backlash is futile. The transparency movement is not going away.
Today, the wall between powerful elected officials and the people they want to represent has started to come down. In America, political campaigns at every level make strenuous efforts to engage in direct and open dialogue with their supporters. They hold special conference calls for political bloggers, they do live chats on Facebook, they respond to direct questions on Twitter, and they engage in video question-and-answer forums on YouTube. Much of this interactivity is aimed at showing that the candidate is “listening to the public” in the same way that a photo-op supposedly shows that a candidate cares about some issue, but sometimes they even give supporters tools to organize themselves on behalf of the campaign and invite them to help shape their agenda. This behavior has become so commonplace in politics that we’ve forgotten how big a cultural shift it represents.
The change isn’t only coming from campaigns and other organizations or figures opening themselves up from the top down. It’s also being created from the bottom up, as we literally carry in our pockets and on our laps the ability to connect and collaborate directly with each other, without requiring permission from the people formerly known as the authorities. And when you combine connectivity with transparency–the ability for more people to see, share, and shape what is going on around them–the result is a huge increase in social energy, which is being channeled in all kinds of directions.
Transparency is the fuel; connectivity is the engine; a sense of oneself as a more effective participant in the democratic process (personal democracy, if you will) is the journey. What is emerging was a greatly expanded notion of the role of citizen not just as a passive consumer of political information and occasional voter, but as an active player, monitoring what government and politicians were doing, demanding a seat at the table and a view of the proceedings, sharing self-generated news of what was important, and participating in problem solving.
The fundamental change powering this networked age of politics is the shift from scarcity to abundance. Thanks to the rapid evolution of computer processing power, all kinds of goods that were once expensive to produce have become cheap. Beyond the declining price of a personal computer or a backup drive, elemental changes in the economics of information, connectivity, and time have occurred.
Social sharing of data–be it MP3 files or once-secret government documents–is out of anyone’s control once the material is in digital form. And anyone who wants to form an association of like-minded souls can do so in seconds, using search tools, social networks, or just plain old email. And while there is still a limit to how many genuine connections one individual can have with others, there is no inherent limit to the number of connections that a community may create laterally. A “one-to-many” email list or social following may look valuable, but no one person can have millions of personal relationships. Thus, while leaders and celebrities remain important, their stars are dimming, as community hubs, forums, and aggregators that knit together thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people are steadily growing. Finally, as the price of memory and disk space has continued to collapse, our ability to share time-intensive and content-rich resources has exploded. While old media like television, radio, and print have inherent physical limits on how much space or time than can give to any subject, on the Internet there are no such limits. The sound bite can be replaced with a sound blast, and if your content is compelling, people will share it for you.
The explosion of capacity means that old practices of hoarding or hiding information, done sometimes for pragmatic reasons (it was too costly to make lots of copies) and other times to maintain a position of privilege, now seem like artificial barriers to access. In this new context, a political campaign that refuses to engage supporters in an interactive manner is now seen as overly controlling. A legislature that makes public documents available solely by printing them in binders and making people come to a basement office in the Capitol, rather than posting them online in searchable, downloadable form, is seen as being ridiculously secretive. Charging exorbitant fees to access public information, or preventing people from contributing their own knowledge, is seen as hopelessly behind the times. And a government body that monopolizes control of public data not only risks undermining trust in its actions. It also stands to lose out in the burgeoning new world of participatory democracy known as “we-government,” where citizens are using connective technologies and public data to create whole new ways of identifying and solving civic problems.
WikiLeaks has to be understood in this context. Let’s posit that what Julian Assange is doing is “radical transparency,” i.e., publishing everything he can get his hands on. He has not, in fact, been doing that, though he is obviously publishing a great deal of raw material. Given that the Internet is a realm of abundance–not scarcity like the old ink-based and airtime-based media–this is a feature, not a bug. Raw data dumps of previously private or secret information are now part of the media landscape. As Max Frankel, former executive editor of The New York Times, recently put it, “The threat of massive leaks will persist so long as there are massive secrets.”
Security expert Bruce Schneier makes a similar point. “Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them,” he wrote on his blog a few weeks after Cablegate started. “The more people who know a secret, the more likelyit is to be made public.” Somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 military and diplomatic personnel had access to the SIPRNet system that Manning tapped. The government actually doesn’t know precisely how many people overall have security clearances to access classified information. Based on reporting from the Government Accountability Office, Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert, estimates the number is 2.5 million people. Given that WikiLeaks’ kind of “radical transparency” is technologically feasible, like it or not, it is now a given of our times. Efforts to stop it will fail, just as efforts to stop file-sharing by killing Napster failed.
It should go without saying that transparency does not mean exposing everyone’s secrets to public view. But given how much our privacy is already being eroded, not just by government but also by private corporations, it’s an understandable concern. It is striking to see how often people react to the news about WikiLeaks by asking how they could possibly do their jobs if every confidential conversation or negotiation were required to be public. But the transparency movement isn’t aimed at exposing the doings of ordinary people to intense scrutiny, and the kind of network effects that occur around instances of information censorship generally don’t happen around spreading someone’s shopping list.”