WikiLeaks: the illusion of transparency
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852311429428 |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Alasdair Roberts |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
78(1) 116–133
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852311429428
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International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Article
WikiLeaks: the illusion of
transparency
Alasdair Roberts
Suffolk University Law School, USA
Abstract
It has been said that the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures mark ‘the end of secrecy in the old
fashioned, cold-war-era sense’. This is not true. Advocates of WikiLeaks have over-
stated the scale and significance of the leaks. They also overlook many ways in which the
simple logic of radical transparency – leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage –
can be defeated in practice. WikiLeaks only created the illusion of a new era in trans-
parency. In fact the 2010 leaks revealed the obstacles to achievement of increased
transparency, even in the digital age.
Points for practitioners
Some commentators have regarded the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 as evidence of a
broader breakdown in the conventional mechanisms for controlling government-held
information. This new world has been described as one of ‘radical transparency’. But
claims about the breakdown of old-style secrecy are overwrought. This article says that
the significance of the WikiLeaks disclosures has been exaggerated, and provides rea-
sons why it will be harder to achieve radical transparency, especially in the security
sector of government.
Keywords
accountability, administration and democracy, e-government, transparency
Introduction
It would not be entirely accurate to call WikiLeaks an organization. In 2010 it was
a network of individuals committed to a project in which new information tech-
nologies are used to eliminate the barriers to leaking governmental and corporate
secrets, and to public disclosure of leaked information. Throughout most of 2010,
WikiLeaks had perhaps a hard core of 40 volunteers, led by the charismatic Julian
Assange (New York Times, 2011). Its aim, some admirers have said, is to wage ‘war
Corresponding author:
Alasdair Roberts, Suffolk University Law School, 120 Tremont Street, Office 210H, Boston MA 02108, USA
Email: alasdair.roberts@gmail.com
on secrecy’ (Calabresi, 2010). WikiLeaks itself says that its aim is to challenge
‘increasing authoritarian tendencies’ in government and the growth of unaccount-
able corporate power (WikiLeaks, 2011a).
1
In 2010, after four years of operation, WikiLeaks orchestrated a series of
disclosures which seemed to give a brilliant demonstration of the power of its meth-
ods. In April, WikiLeaks released a classified video showing an attack by US Army
helicopters in the streets of Baghdad in 2007 that killed 12 people, including two
journalists with the Reuters news agency. In July, it collaborated with a consortium
of three major newspapers on the release of 90,000 documents describing US military
operations in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. These are known as the Afghan war
logs. In October 2010, the same consortium collaborated with WikiLeaks in the
release of a similar but larger set of documents – almost 400,000 – detailing US
military operations in Iraq over the same period. In November came the coup de
gra
ˆce: partial disclosures from a cache of a quarter-million cables sent between the
US State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world.
By the end of 2010, WikiLeaks and Assange had become the center of a vast
media spectacle. The scale and significance of the leaks, and the rapidity with which
one followed another, led many observers to conclude that the world was moving
into a new era of supercharged or ‘radical transparency’ (Sifry, 2011a). The 2010
leaks marked ‘the end of secrecy in the old-fashioned, cold-war-era sense’, according
to two journalists from the Guardian, David Leigh and Luke Harding, who worked
in the consortium (Leigh and Harding, 2011: 183). WikiLeaks had triggered ‘a true
information and political earthquake’, concluded another commentator (Heusser,
2010). A Norwegian politician nominated WikiLeaks for the Nobel Peace Prize,
saying that it had helped to ‘redraw the map of information freedom’ (CNN,
2011). ‘Like him or not’, said Time magazine in December 2010, Assange now
‘has the power to impose his judgment of what should or shouldn’t be secret’
(Calabresi, 2010).
All of this is vastly overwrought. Certainly, new information technologies have
made it easier to leak sensitive information and broadcast it to the world (Roberts,
2006: 73, 2008: 167). A generation ago, leaking was limited by the need to phys-
ically copy and smuggle actual documents. Now it is a matter of dragging, drop-
ping, and clicking send. Nevertheless, the 2010 leaks did not mark the end of
‘old-fashioned secrecy’. Boosters of WikiLeaks have overestimated the scale and
significance of the leaks. They have also overlooked many ways in which the simple
logic of radical transparency – leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage –
can be defeated in practice. WikiLeaks only created the illusion of a new era in
transparency. In fact, the 2010 leaks revealed the obstacles to achievement of
increased transparency, even in the digital age.
How big a breach?
We should begin by putting the 2010 leaks in proper perspective. A common
way of arguing for their significance is by emphasizing the sheer volume of
Roberts 117
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