Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy'
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‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’
I think that wraps it up for me as far as my opinion of Mr Assange as a person is concerned.
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Nicky Hager, whose stewardship of the cables on behalf of New Zealand media has been responsible and informed by his own experience.
These seem to have dried up. I guess Hager is either sitting on them for the election campaign or writing another book.
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Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’
*choke*
I wonder if he thought that one through before he spoke, because that’s calling death upon everyone who ever contributed anything to WL. Though I guess it’s possible that his disdain for those who made him famous extends as far as believing they all deserve to die. Probably in quite horrible ways.ETA: The comment certainly does absolutely nothing for my opinion of the man, I have to say.
if a great state was behaving entirely virtuously, and in accordance with its public positions, would its foreign service officials still sometimes need to speak in confidence
Of course they would, unless one considers it to be lacking in virtuosity to have in-private conversations with, say, Nelson Mandella in apartheid-era South Africa. If the only way to be entirely virtuous is to tread entirely within the bounds set by unjust, oppressive regimes, then, no, I guess maybe not.
Consider Falun Gong, whose members are persecuted in mainland China and who may find themselves subjected to unwanted official attention were their names to be mentioned in correspondence between FSO’s. Countries with religious freedom uphold the right, and would hopefully consider it virtuous to explore with FG members the extent of the persecution, but could certainly not find out except through official (and highly-sanitised) channels were their every word to be made public. -
Russell Brown, in reply to
These seem to have dried up. I guess Hager is either sitting on them for the election campaign or writing another book.
Turns out there's quite a story there. We'll cover it in the show.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Goody! Look forward to that, and in the meantime thank you for the review - it does put the focus on Assange's personality under a rather more useful light than was perhaps the case at the time of the cable releases.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Goody! Look forward to that, and in the meantime thank for the review – it does put the focus on Assange’s personality under a rather more useful light than was perhaps the case at the time of the cable releases.
Thanks. As I said, the book did also impress upon me what he has achieved and where he comes from.
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After I finished the book last night, I mused on a thought experiment: if a great state was behaving entirely virtuously, and in accordance with its public positions, would its foreign service officials still sometimes need to speak in confidence, if only to help and protect human rights and democratic activists suffering under less enlightened regimes? I suspect they would. Wikileaks itself could not operate without its thoroughgoing internal secrecy. Investigative journalists could not work if they could not keep their sources secret. Clearly, not every secret is a scandal.
I've mused on this, too.
Not every secretive activity by politicians and civil servants is going to be sinister (or morally wrong); without information about how corrupt or closed the political class are the most we can usually say is that if a political activity takes place in secret, then it is suspicious (otherwise, why undertake it in secret?).
So, if the political class want to avoid be tarred with the allegation of such suspicious behaviour, then the burden of proof is on them to provide a good reason for such secrecy being necessary for what they are doing.
Of course, the problem can then become "What if the reason for such secrecy is itself something that needs to be kept secret?"
The example I keep coming back to in my thesis (with regards to secrecy as suspicious rather than sinister) is the Surprise Party; a good (well-planned and executed) surprise party relies on the organisers not just keeping secrets (a suspicious activity) but also sometimes lying about what they are up to (potentially a sinister activity). Yet, with (hopefully) very few exceptions, surprise parties are not malevolent events.
[I think the use of surprise parties as an analogy here is problematic, mostly due to scope. Surprise parties tend to affect a very small number of people whilst the kind of secrecy we're talking about with regards to governments and the like affects much larger groups.]
I think we (the human population as a whole) tend to conflate suspicious activity with sinister activity; not all suspicious activity is actually sinister. Of course, we've probably got more reason to be suspicious of secretive political activity, especially given how conspiratorial our collective political past has been.
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‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’
We have no idea whether quotes like the one above are taken out of context or quite what the scenario was. They certainly contradict many of the public statements made by Wikileaks.
What we have seen is many journalists, including an editor of the NYT, claim that what Wikileaks does is not journalism and therefore not deserving of the same free speech protection that the NYT gets. This is breathtaking.
I have found the extracts of this book running in the Guardian badly written and uninformative, with little insight or analysis to redeem them.
Much better has been the analysis by Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, of Wikileaks and Assange, including Assange's own fairly surreal world.
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There is certainly open contradiction with the line on informants - which hadn't been challenged to my knowledge by any Wikileaks collaborators in the media before - namely that WL had given the US State Department a chance to clear the information of the Iraq and Afghanistan cables before release to protect the sources. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the quote - if indeed correct, and I have no particular reason to doubt it - justifies in any way the treatment of private Manning, but it is cause for major concerns on the operation I would think.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
We have no idea whether quotes like the one above are taken out of context or quite what the scenario was.
I'd have thought it was about as clear as it could be, even from the excerpt. The two Guardian journalists raised the issue of redaction over dinner with Assange, in the presence of two journalists from Der Spiegel. Four people seem to have heard his response.
For purposes of clarity, this is the paragraph that precedes the excerpt in my review:
The knottiest problem surrounded redactions. The papers planned only to publish a relatively small number of significant stories, and with them the text of the handful of relevant logs. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, intended simultaneously to unleash the lot. But many of the entries, particularly the “threat reports” derived from intelligence, mentioned the names of informants or those who had collaborated with US troops. In the vicious internecine politics of Afghanistan, such people could be in danger. Declan Walsh was among the first to realise this:
The book does go on to point out that Assange "eventually revisited his view, despite the technical difficulties it posed for WikiLeaks. And by the time the US state department cables were published, five months later, Assange had entirely embraced the logic of redaction, with his role almost that of a mainstream publisher."
They certainly contradict many of the public statements made by Wikileaks.
I think it's evident by now that Assange makes statements that contradict his previous positions. You only need to follow Wikileaks on Twitter to see that.
I have found the extracts of this book running in the Guardian badly written and uninformative, with little insight or analysis to redeem them.
With you there. They're generally the worst parts of the book.
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These seem to have dried up. I guess Hager is either sitting on them for the election campaign or writing another book.
It's pretty frustrating, and certainly one reason I am sure WL wanted more out than less. Journalists have their own, often narrow, agendas which are not generally those of the public interest. For example, it is only now that cables about ACTA are being released. They contain quite useful information, not least for NZers and NZ businesses who might fall foul of this and similar trade agreements with the USA.
Looking forward hearing the revelations on Media 7 about the drying up of Hager's releases.
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The review was long enough already, but I should note I’m not so impressed by the basis of Davies’ withdrawal from working with Assange: both sides believed they had a regarding exclusivity, and Davies was sufficiently incensed when their respective understandings proved to be quite different that he refused to continue dealing with Assange. A journalistic tiff, mostly, and one being spun by both sides since.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
It’s pretty frustrating, and certainly one reason I am sure WL wanted more out than less. Journalists have their own, often narrow, agendas which are not generally those of the public interest.
They also have the knowledge and contacts to know what the story is. I was surprised by how much of the heavy lifting on preparing the stories – like, nearly all of it – was actually done by the Guardian team.
They contain quite useful information, not least for NZers and NZ businesses who might fall foul of this and similar trade agreements with the USA.
That is problematic, and from my understanding the failure of some stories to appear is indeed a failure at certain news organisations.
I’m reasonably sure that Nicky Hager would be open to an approach on ACTA. Has anyone tried?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
The example I keep coming back to in my thesis (with regards to secrecy as suspicious rather than sinister) is the Surprise Party
You never said you were throwing me a surprise party! Oh, wait.
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They went to Moro! Nice restaurant!
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if a great state was behaving entirely virtuously, and in accordance with its public positions
Has this ever happened?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Journalists have their own, often narrow, agendas which are not generally those of the public interest.
Woah. You're talking about some very, very good journalists here. Leigh faced down an intimidating lawsuit from the corrupt British MP Jonathan Aitken, stood by his impeccably-researched story -- and saw Aitken eventually jailed for perjury. Davies has also shown courage and dedication, most recently in the phone-hacking case.
They're not exactly Jonathan Marshall.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
Of course they would, unless one considers it to be lacking in virtuosity to have in-private conversations with, say, Nelson Mandella in apartheid-era South Africa.
What it comes down to, really, is "do you trust the people who are deciding what stays secret and what doesn't?". And the goal, sometimes, should not be to make everything public, but to make sure the people who make those decisions can be trusted.
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That is problematic, and from my understanding the failure of some stories to appear is indeed a failure at certain news organisations.
Er, Hager can publish on the web, can't he?
BTW, I should also have said, nice review and analysis. Agree about the Davies/Assange tiff. Egos colliding, I guess.
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BenWilson, in reply to
They went to Moro! Nice restaurant!
I hear the bar is also nice.
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After I finished the book last night, I mused on a thought experiment: if a great state was behaving entirely virtuously, and in accordance with its public positions, would its foreign service officials still sometimes need to speak in confidence, if only to help and protect human rights and democratic activists suffering under less enlightened regimes?
Sure. The problem is precisely that our government's don't behave virtuously, and use secrecy to hide the fact and to avoid being held to account. And there's a NZ example of this just today, with the government exposed as having lied to us (and potentially lied to Parliament) over its negotiating position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA.
If we repealed s6(a) of the OIA (the "international relations") clause, or made it subject to the public interest like the others, then the sorts of information cited above, which everyone would agree should be protected, could be, while giving us a much better picture of - and therefore much greater control over - what our government was doing. But that would require the government to voluntarily yield power to the people. And that is somethign politicians as a class a loath to do.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
And there’s a NZ example of this just today, with the government exposed as having lied to us (and potentially lied to Parliament) over its negotiating position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA.
There's no proof that the government lied to us, merely that they didn't communicate the fullness of the threat to our national sovereignty. That may, as the release allows, simply have been Key misunderstanding the language. It's possible, though he shouldn't have shot his mouth off without knowing the full details.
Regardless, that's a scary development when we've got a bunch in power who would like nothing better than to hock off much of what remains of our taxpayer silver, and privatise ACC to boot. Rewind to 1999, where one of Labour's first acts was to reverse the competition element of ACC, and it would probably not happen again because the offshore insurers would scream bloody murder and collectively sue for billions in lost future profits.
Similarly, if Labour decide to revoke Toll's stranglehold on rail freight, that won't happen if Toll can demand massive compensation.
Free trade is one thing, but corporates should have no more rights to compensation offshore than they would have onshore. NZ insurers would have no right to sue if ACC were re-privatised, so why should foreigners?
I can see this making the corporate immunity situation worse, as companies engaging in politically-risky endeavours create foreign shells through which to conduct their business dealings. If the political climate sours, the shell company sues even though the truly-affected parent is housed in the jurisdiction where the offending change took place. NZ's already being dealt to in such a fashion through offshore ownership of many trading entities, but at least it's not done with a deliberate eye to future lawsuits should the political climate go south.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Sure. The problem is precisely that our government’s don’t behave virtuously, and use secrecy to hide the fact and to avoid being held to account.
And held to account they should be.
But there's been a good deal of absolutist rhetoric expressed since we all started talking about Wikileaks, and some people clearly believe there should be no public secrets. At all.
That seems unrealistic, to put it mildly -- because even a purely virtuous government would find it necessary to maintain some secrets, or to take advice in confidence.
Even simply releasing the quarter of a million Cablegate documents into the wild would be reckless. It appears that the Guardian's redacting team may already have placed Morgan Tsvangirai in mortal peril by failing to remove his name from a diplomatic cable from Zimbabwe.
In that case, the US government was behaving exactly as we would wish it to do in taking counsel from Mugabe's opponents -- but it could only safely do so in secret.
Wikileaks' "not our problem -- it's the Guardian's fault" response via Twitter when that problem emerged was spectacularly unhelpful.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
because even a purely virtuous government would find it necessary to maintain some secrets, or to take advice in confidence.
One of the obvious ones is commercial confidence. Companies will be loathe to tender on state contracts if they know that their pricing models and terms will be available to the competition, even if the competition didn’t bid on a given contract, through the simple expedient of an OIA or equivalent request.
There’s also the safety of the population, and those whose duty it is to maintain that safety. A former colleague was a transparency absolutist, who believed that even tactical response plans to terrorist incidents should be public information. The problem with that is that terrorists will read the plans, adapt their plans accordingly, and their attacks will become vastly more successful through the expedient of hindering, if not killing, the responders.
Once one knows what the forces of goodness and light will do to respond to one’s forces of evil and darkness, one can make their lives dramatically more difficult right from the planning stages of one’s operation. Which is “a bad thing"[tm], unless one happens to be the aforementioned forces of evil and darkness.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Turns out there's quite a story there. We'll cover it in the show.
Let's just hope we're not being primed for another Operation Leaf...
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