We Open Governments: WikiLeaks for Beginners

Is Julian Assange a Transparency Activist Par Excellence or an Anarchist “Minister of Chaos”?

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"WikiLeaks is really one of the very few, if not the only group, effectively putting fear into the hearts of the world’s most powerful and corrupt people, and that’s why they deserve, I think, enthusiastic support from anyone who truly believes in transparency, notwithstanding what might be valid, though relatively trivial, criticisms…" – Glenn Greenwald

Love him or hate him, Julian Assange has become the (rather handsome, if a bit pasty) face of the global movement for government and corporate transparency. Through WikiLeaks, Assange has, arguably, helped release more classified information than the rest of the entire world press combined. Assange says this reveals the "perilous state of the rest of the media" and rightly asks how a team as small as his could accomplish such a feat in just four years of existence. WikiLeaks has hit all the bases – the media, governments, and corporations are all scrambling to address the consequences of the leaks. Beyond the damage control and the dirty tricks, a radical and fundamental shift in the balance of power is underway. Let’s just say that folks aren’t calling Assange an anarchist for nothing. But what is the rationale behind WikiLeaks, its methods, its goals? Don’t expect an answer from the media. The reasons behind the project have long been overlooked by the mainstream press, captivated as it is with its own sensationalistic ‘hit pieces’ on Assange month after month and its alarmist or just plain misguided attempts to explain how and why WikiLeaks presumes to “open governments” as only it can.

The Empire has no clothes
From WikiLeaks, we have learned the truth about who's dropping whose bombs, the Afghan Vice President who ripped off $52 million dollars from Allah knows where (see the leaked cable for yourself), the US military’s helicopter attack on civilians and journalists, government-backed torture, the uncounted murders of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan people, and even what every country secretly wants for Christmas. We have it on video, on paper, and it’s all over the all-mighty Internet. Thanks to WikiLeaks and fellow whistleblowers, we don’t just have the truth about these horrors, we now have the proof of them.

WikiLeaks is the outcome of much theorizing on the part of Assange and his colleagues and is one of the boldest experiments in opening governments and creating transparency in the world, ever. It’s also one of the most anarchic and prescient. Assange himself has described a cohesive framework for understanding the purpose of WikiLeaks. And while you might want to grab a cup of coffee before diving into reading his essays, his writing doesn’t demand that you also grab a dictionary, or a wiktionary, to decipher it.

Assange begins his essay “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” by defining the efforts of authoritarian regimes to conceal their plans as conspiratorial. He argues: “Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.” And who are the conspirators in these conspiratorial regimes? They are the government officials, bureaucrats, agents, and employees who regularly keep their decision-making processes and plans from the public. They often rely on secrecy to ensure the smooth functioning of their departments, offices, and agencies and to maintain their positions of power and influence.

You won’t find a list of specific regimes that Assange deems conspiratorial in his essay. It is enough for him to describe their patterns and to develop frameworks that further our understanding. Whether we think that it is justified or not, states like the US rely on secrecy in order to function, a characteristic shared with authoritarian regimes. Assange theorizes that the way to effectively undermine conspiratorial behavior is to prevent or impede the ability of a regime’s personnel to communicate, to conspire, with one another. If a government cannot communicate internally, it cannot longer function normally.

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