WikiLeaks has embarrassed the Governments the world over by its exposure of Foreign Relations details of many a country.
As has been pointed out ,there has been wilful wrong doing,outright lying,dressing up of information , deals within deals by Nations.
Also there has been special interest groups for whom there was a specific agenda to be carried out and the leaders have done their bidding.
It also exposed the crassly crude descriptions of world leaders by those in authority.
Does this mean one should ensure all documents relating to foreign relations be in the Public Domain?
Answer is Yes and No.
Those details the exposure of which might be a National Security Threat may be with held.
(this begs the question.who decides on what National Security is ?
This can be addressed separately.)
Other than this, all documents must be in the Public Realm,especially relating to natural Resources sharing, Exports, Duty cut backs Corporates)
In a Democracy such as India, the Opposition Parties have a Duty to perform in eliciting the information on the Floor of the Parliament .
Unfortunately they don’, for they know they have to face same fate when they come to power and they also have things to hide.
Take Bofors issue,Musharraf failing to sign the Agreement,bringing into the open Black Money stashed abroad.
Finally it all comes to Leaders of Integrity and Honesty, which, now ,is at a premium.
WikiLeaks is neither the Russian Bolshevik party nor the American Democratic party. Nevertheless WikiLeaks is readdressing the issue which was left open at the end of the First World War: is diplomatic secret in the people’s interest? Both Trotsky and Wilson moved their agenda forward to some limited extent: the Soviet Union soon became a harsh dictatorship and transparency was so despised under Stalin that even the map of the Moscow underground was a classified document. The practice of publicity had better luck in the United States and in other Western countries. Transparency and accountability started to be common sense in consolidated democratic regimes although state secret still exists and diplomacy is still covered by the seven veils of classified documents. Even in the most democratic countries, secrecy in international affairs continues to be justified by the need to protect the state’s integrity and to guarantee citizens’ security and these aims prevail over the need to guarantee transparency and freedom of expression.
Through WikiLeaks world public opinion was informed of numerous violations of humanitarian law in Afghanistan, of false reports on the legitimacy of the military intervention in Iraq, of the exaggeration of the weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein. This core information has been peppered with hundreds and hundreds of more exciting but less relevant gossip about political celebrities. Not surprisingly, those holding the secrets have reacted furiously against the leaks, have made what efforts they can to prevent further leaks and threatened retaliation against those who provided the information, those who published it and even those who dared to read it. The prize for the most furious reaction goes to Congressman Peter King, who wanted WikiLeaks to be declared a foreign terrorist organization. These reactions are certainly comprehensible but not justified. If there is the need to fight a war, the citizens, the taxpayers and even more the conscripted should clearly know the reasons for spilling blood on the battleground. Otherwise, as Noam Chomsky correctly pointed out, “government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population”.
Until now WikLleaks’ revelations have not provoked major damage to intelligence mechanisms, either in Afghanistan or anywhere else. It may always be that such revelations can harm and identify specific persons, making their actions and their information services known to malicious people. Excessive transparency can in principle be dangerous for a few individuals, and it should be balanced with the need to protect the privacy of individuals. At the expense of violating the privacy of many individuals, WikiLeaks has allowed public opinion to know that public offices have been used for private purposes, that false information has been released with the explicit aim of diverting public attention, that crimes have been committed without liability. Looking at the outcomes so far produced, it can be argued that the violation of privacy has been minimal compared to the relevance of the information provided to public opinion.
An instrument like WikiLeaks has proven to be helpful not only in making governments and their officials more accountable. It has also proved very useful to check and control the business sector. We have already seen that WikiLeaks has started eating into banking secrecy, with the publication of the greatest tax dodgers’ lists by a banker that worked in Cayman Islands on behalf of the Swiss bank Julius Baer. In this case, it would be difficult to claim that confidentiality on tax evasion and money laundering should be protected in deference of privacy. It is somehow surprising that some Courts, rather than using the occasion to prosecute financial crimes, have preferred to be on the side of the banks and requested that leaked documents should be removed from the public domain.
WikiLeaks raises a more general point that needs to be addressed: is there any effective filter between the load of information leaked out and what is actually published? WikilLeaks today has been a pioneer and it is carrying out an important public function, but it is probably inappropriate that an unaccountable private organization holds so much power. The opportunity to publish classified document has traditionally been a prerogative of all media, but there is no media, to date, that is solely devoted to releasing classified documents. This puts WikiLeakes in a league by its own.
The responsibility to monitor the transparency of geopolitical relations, of financial flows and of other sensitive information should be put in the hands of organizations that are themselves fully transparent and accountable. The empirical research carried out by One World Trust on the accountability of inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and of business corporations has often provided counter-intuitive results, indicating that institutions such as the World Bank are more transparent than institutions such as the WWF International.# Paradoxically, WikiLeaks risks being an organization more secretive than those whose documents it publishes. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” said Juvenal and today we can wonder: “Who will assure the transparency of those who generate transparency?”
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