The leaking of 250,000 diplomatic cables by Wikileaks this week is nothing new.
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Well, to clarify, the information is of course new. The leaking of previously secret data to the public, and the public’s lust for it, is as old as history.
Resisting Wikileaks – that is, branding it a terrorist organization or, worse, shutting it down – would be both foolish and futile, for several reasons.
Foolish is pitting the law against technology. This is flat-out an unfair fight. Think about the effectiveness of anti-spam laws, privacy commissioners and anti-downloading groups. Sure, they get angry, wave their hands around and threaten a lot of terrifying consequences, but do they actually achieve anything?
The only way to stop the proliferation of government leaks online is to build better security to stop the leaks in the first place. The law has nothing on technology, so the fight should be technology versus technology. It comes down to the age-old battle of hackers versus security.
Shutting down the site and believing the problem will disappear is foolish as well, but even more futile.
The governments embarrassed by Wikileaks blame Julian Assange, the site’s eccentric figurehead.
But he is a just that, a figurehead. He may run the day-to-day operations of the site or work doggedly hard as an evangelist for Wikileaks, but he is not irreplaceable. The site he created is here to stay.
If Google CEO Eric Schmidt or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were removed from their positions, their technology companies might not run as smoothly, but they would still run. The same goes for Wikileaks.
Just as Assange is replaceable, so is his site. Wikileaks, lest we forget, is just a delivery mechanism. Shut it down and another will sprout up. If it’s not Assange and Wikileaks, it’s someone else and another site.
In all matters of life, it is far better to know than not. A better-informed public makes better-informed decisions. (This sentiment appears not to be lost on the Canadian government, which was set to declassify its portion of the cables in 2018 anyway.)
Assange is an irritant, clearly, but he has performed a vital service. The governments of the world have obviously not kept their secrets close to their chests, and through Wikileaks he has alerted them to this fact.
The world needs such irritants. Plato’s mentor, Socrates, lest we forget, was such a gadfly. At his trial, he did not overstate the value of a rabble-rouser: “If you kill such a one as I, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me… for I sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.”
joshuae@nowtoronto.com
