Friday, December 10, 2010

Wikileaks releases no reason to slam lid on public access

10 Dec, 2010
Source: My Centraljersey

As an international firestorm swirls regarding the leaks of thousands of classified U.S. government documents via the nonprofit Web site Wikileaks, cooler heads can prevail by taking valuable lessons regarding this dissemination of our state secrets.

Whatever judicial fate befalls Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, it will be a mere sideshow in what promises to be an ongoing series of unauthorized, and embarrassing, official document dumps. The releases, should they continue unabated, may keep exposing American government motives and machinations throughout the international arena.

Instead of taking a shoot-the-messenger approach, the U.S. government needs to take tangible steps toward strengthening our democracy and democratic values here and abroad. And that — counterintuitively, perhaps — will require less secrecy, not more.

First and foremost, government officials need to take stock of the system of classifying government documents as well as our cyber security programs. It is well chronicled that the United States government has labeled literally tens of millions of documents as secret — in essence creating a huge vacuum of information, to much of which the public should rightfully have access. That policy not only invites more leaks to fill that vacuum, but virtually challenges the public to pull back the curtain. And that kind of haphazard release of information is something over which government will have little control, as evidenced by the Wikileaks debacle.

Government officials need to be more judicious in determining what truly should be kept private for national security reasons and what should be available to citizens, regardless of inconvenience or embarrassment. It is the public, after all, that funds the government that is supposed to be acting in our best interests. And as we've seen far too many times, government can't be trusted to always do the right thing on its own.

The media also has a chance to support the cause. Instead of passively sitting back and being vilified by grandstanding politicians for being complicit in disseminating secret information from Wikileaks, it's time for the media to make it abundantly clear that it will not subordinate itself to acts of government officials that are illegal, and even unethical, in nature. The Wikileaks controversy should be a call to arms in the fight for open government, not a cause to retreat.

Many have drawn an apt analogy between the recent releases on Wikileaks to the publishing of The Pentagon Papers by the New York Times in 1971. There, classified documents showed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks — none of which had been reported by the media covering the Vietnam War.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to defeat a federal court injunction to stop the release of the articles in the newspaper. In his passionate opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."

In the end, the document dumps on Wikileaks may prove to be good for our democracy, as it forces the media to defend its right to simply reveal the truth.

No comments: