For whistleblowers, government and press, the age of digileaks cries out for new rules on what to hide – and reveal
Suppose you know a secret that you think should be made public. How do you go about it? Suppose your organisation has secrets you believe must be guarded. What should you do? Suppose you are an editor, blogger or activist, with the whistleblower huffing in your left ear and a government or company puffing in your right. Where do you draw the line?
One answer to the first question comes from Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former member of the WikiLeaks team. His OpenLeaks initiative aims to provide an untraceable "digital dropbox" in which would-be whistleblowers can deposit their digital troves. However, OpenLeaks would not itself select and publish material, as WikiLeaks did when it edited – and titled Collateral Murder – a video taken from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq as it killed 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children.
As Domscheit-Berg explained it to me when we met earlier this year, the leaker would decide which from a select list of media and NGO partners he or she would like the material to go to. So, for example, an environmentalist whistleblower might say: "I like Greenpeace, and I trust them to use my documents in the right spirit." Someone in the German defence ministry might say: "I trust Der Spiegel to publish this responsibly." And so on. All the editorial judgments would lie with the participating news organisation or NGO. OpenLeaks would be a neutral, technical transmission mechanism – the guardian of secrecy in the cause of openness.
Domscheit-Berg is a tall, thin, intense, almost painfully idealistic young German. Passionate about the value of freedom of information, he wishes everyone to have the chance of their "five minutes of courage". This, as he points out, can be all it takes to press the button and transfer mountains of dirt. If he wants to be really scrupulous about this, maybe he should also give them five hours of reflection afterwards, in case they think better of it.
I shall be interested to see how OpenLeaks fares. In a phone conversation yesterday, Domscheit-Berg told me that they hope to launch in the late spring or early summer, probably with a modest initial slate of three media and three NGO partners. The technical difficulties of ensuring cast-iron anonymity for the source, especially against a powerful opponent such as the US or Chinese government, remain considerable. Even though OpenLeaks will argue that it does not have any legal responsibility for publication, it will surely face legal challenges. Meanwhile, leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian are also considering setting up their own "leak here" facilities.
In whatever way this process unfolds, every government, company, university and other organisation must assume that there will be more anonymised digital leaking – or digileaks, for short. The next question is therefore to the potentially leaked-against, rather than the would-be leaker. How do you strike the balance between transparency and secrecy? Even secret services and Swiss banks now nod towards openness. Yet I know of no organisation in the world that is 100% transparent. Everyone has something they want to hide – and some things they can reasonably argue that they are justified in hiding. Often the two do not exactly coincide. Witness, for example, the hilarious spectacle of Julian Assange protesting furiously at leaks from inside WikiLeaks.
Newspapers, dedicated to openness, fight to keep secret their sources' identity. So do human rights organisations, arguing that otherwise their informants might be in danger from repressive and corrupt regimes. The anti-corruption movement Transparency International can't be wholly transparent. There is, if you will, a dialectic here. But there can also be hypocrisy: demanding of others what you are not prepared to do or have done to yourself. (The private lives of tabloid editors spring to mind.) There is a fine line between ethical dialectics and rank hypocrisy.
So what should an organisation do? I suggest two guiding principles. First, be open about your grounds for secrecy, transparent about your non-transparency. Have clear criteria and be ready to defend them. They should be able to withstand the following, somewhat paradoxical test: if this piece of information became public, could you credibly explain why it should not have become public?
Thus, for example, there is absolutely no good defence for keeping secret the American helicopter gunship video. What it showed was at best a terrible blunder in the fog of war, at worst a war crime. It should have been investigated and published. On the other hand, when it comes to the details of secret peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli representatives, leaked to al-Jazeera and published in the Guardian, you could argue that there was a genuine public interest in keeping those secret. How else can negotiators have the confidence to explore the publicly unsayable, in the pursuit of peace? By the time you get to foreign correspondents being taken hostage, you find newspapers themselves being active practitioners of concealment.
My second guiding principle is: protect less, but protect it better. There is a vast amount of stuff that governments and organisations keep secret for no good reason. That was the premise behind the campaigns for more freedom of information, now conceded by many democratic governments – and it has been proved right. Daylight was let in to dusty rooms, and the business of government did not collapse. Reading the US state department cables in the database that the Guardian made from the Wikileaks trove, I found reports classified as secret that could easily have appeared as news analysis pieces in a newspaper.
So: decide what you really do need to keep secret, on consistent, defensible criteria, and then do your damnedest to keep it secret. Don't, for example, upload it to a database accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. If following this second commandment results in a reduction in the amount of printed paper and emails in circulation, that will itself be a service to the rainforests and everyday sanity.
But what if something radioactive still leaks out from the smaller secret core, whether via the OpenLeaks mechanism or in other ways? Should Ms Ethical Journalist blushingly avert her eyes and hand it back unread, exclaiming "Deary me, I really shouldn't be seeing this"? The hell she should. It is the business of government to keep its secrets. It is the business of the press to find them out.
The press – here used in the broadest sense, to include citizen bloggers and activist NGOs – then makes its own judgment calls about what is in the public interest and what will be unacceptably damaging. The law sets the outer boundaries for this age-old game of hide-and-seek. The calls made by the journalist will not be the same as those made by the minister – or the company director, or the hospital boss, or the university vice-chancellor. Each plays their part, and the result is one of democracy's most important sets of checks and balances.
Digileaks change democracy as graphite rackets changed tennis. Whether they make it better or worse will depend on the rules, the umpires and the players.