Bruce Schneier is a very smart guy, but I think that the basic premiss of his “argument here”:http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/12/wikileaks_1.html is wrong.
bq. WikiLeaks is just a website. The real story is that “least trusted person” who decided to violate his security clearance and make these cables public. In the 1970s he would have mailed them to a newspaper. Today he uses WikiLeaks. Tomorrow he will have his choice of a dozen similar websites. If WikiLeaks didn’t exist, he could have put them up on BitTorrent.
Schneier seems to be assuming here that the most important part of the Wikileaks story is the _release of information._ This is a very commonly held assumption. But that doesn’t make it a correct assumption. What’s important about Wikileaks is not only the _release_ of information but its _legitimation._ And here, the organizational history of Wikileaks and its current organizational form and strategy matter. A lot.
This is something I’ve been talking about with my colleague Marty Finnemore on and off over the last few months, ever since the first significant leaks appeared. I think that the best way to understand what is happening is through looking at the kinds of sociological processes that she examines in her work, through which one might describe international organizations as transforming information into knowledge. Simplifying brutally (I am trying to provide my own spin on Marty’s view of the world – she should not be held responsible for obvious errors of logic etc) – the fact that this or that academic study exists, which purports to prove this or that thing about world poverty, may be immaterial to states’ decision-making processes, even if everyone accepts that the study is correct. But if that academic study is taken up by, say, the World Bank, becoming the basis for new reports, measurement techniques and so on, it is legitimated, and becomes actionable knowledge. A lot of ‘knowledge’ out there in the world of policy making is demonstrably badly flawed or out-and-out wrong (you may or may not like Bill Easterly’s politics, but his book on the World Bank is excellent on this topic). But it is crucially important, in ways that the ‘right’ information is not, because it has been legitimated by the appropriate authorities, and hence forms part of the official consensus.
And this is a key part of the Wikileaks story. My understanding is that Assange and others in Wikileaks had been frustrated by the lack of take-up of earlier information on the US government that they had leaked, prompting them to cooperate more directly with journalists at elite newspapers such as the _New York Times._ This had the intended or unintended consequence of allowing them to transform information into knowledge. Most of the cables that have come to light so far have not provided new information. It was no great secret that Libya had probably put pressure on the UK over the Megrahi release, that the US was doing strikes in Yemen etc, even if no one was prepared to confirm this in public. But if this was reported by the US government – and then pushed into the mainstream of public debate by journalists for highly respected news organizations, it became common knowledge that could not easily be ignored. Not only did everyone know it – everyone knew that everyone else knew it too. This explains “Rachman’s paradox”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/12/wikileaks-not-so-dull-after-all/ – why apparently banal revelations can have very important political consequences.
But it also points up the strengths and weaknesses of Wikileaks. Just putting the documents up on Bittorrent, as per Schneier’s suggestion, would have been very unlikely to have had the same impact. It would have had _some_ impact – since it reflected US government judgments, and hence had been legitimated in that particular sense – but would have been much less likely to have been taken up by major newspapers and hence given a second baptism of legitimation. The ability to forge relationships with journalists is what makes Wikileaks more than a simple repository for data dumps. But it is also what makes Wikileaks vulnerable. Simply put – Wikileaks needs a real organization to maintain relationships with journalists, sift through its own information and so on. It also probably needs some kind of external legitimating mechanisms over the longer term. But if the US government is successful in isolating it from legitimate relations with the kinds of financial, informational and reputational networks it would need to do this, than the US government may greatly mitigate the threat that it poses. If Wikileaks-style organizations are confined to the margins of public discourse, where the information they uncover is unlikely to be legitimated by other sources, they can’t do very much damage.