WikiLeaks, a Postscript
(By BILL KELLER, Opinion Essay, The New York Times, February 19, 2012)
This is apparently the revenge of Julian Assange: everyone who runs afoul of the rock-star leaker is condemned to spend eternity discussing the cosmic meaning of WikiLeaks. As the editor of The Times during our publication of many articles based on that treasury of military and diplomatic secrets, and as the lucky man the WikiLeaks founder singled out as his Least Favorite Journalist, I have participated in half a dozen panel discussions, and turned down at least that many. I can’t complain about the one in Madrid, where, after holding forth in a packed auditorium, the American, British, German, French and Spanish editors who broke news based on WikiLeaks commemorated the collaboration with an after-hours prowl through the Prado Museum and a 27-course meal cooked by master chef Ferran Adrià. (If Europe is dying, Spain is where I plan to go for the wake.) Unforgettable in a different way was the retrospective in Berkeley, where Assange himself, then as now awaiting an extradition ruling in England, was Skyped in on a giant screen, like the mighty Oz, to pontificate on Western media’s failure to turn the files into a kind of Nuremberg trial of American imperialism. About half the audience seemed on the verge of tossing their underwear at the screen.
Add to that the three or four documentaries on the WikiLeaks adventure, the dozen books — including, weirdly, Assange’s unauthorized autobiography — and a couple speculative Hollywood projects, in which I have a twofold interest. (1. The very slight possibility that I might make some money for my small piece of the story. 2. The exceedingly remote chance that a director will take up my wife’s brilliant idea that Assange be played by Tilda Swinton.)
It’s amazing they keep inviting me to these things, since I’m a bit of a spoilsport. My consistent answer to the ponderous question of how WikiLeaks transformed our world has been: really, not all that much. It was a hell of a story and a wild collaboration, but it did not herald, as the documentarians yearn to believe, some new digital age of transparency. In fact, if there is a larger point, it is quite the contrary.
With the subject showing no signs of going away — one more documentary melodrama of our WikiLeaks adventure will be featured at next month’s South by Southwest festival — I decided to check up on the lingering fallout from what may be the nation’s all-time greatest cascade of blown secrets.
Assange himself, who gave a handful of journalists early access to the pilfered data, has moved from a supporter’s country mansion to much more modest digs while he fights extradition to Sweden on sexual abuse charges. An American grand jury is believed to still be mulling an indictment for his role in the leaks. He compiled many hours of interviews for an autobiography, then backed out of the project, but his publisher — in the proper anarchist spirit of WikiLeaks — published it over his objections. (Evidently not for profit. It is No. 1,288,313 on the Amazon list of best-selling titles.) Assange’s newest project, announced last month, is a television talk show in which he will interview “iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders.” So says the proud buyer of this series, RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda arm and keeper of the cult of Putin. No, not kidding.
Kremlin TV aside, Assange has declined from global notoriety to B-list celebrity: he lacks enough star power for a hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live,” but he did have a cameo in Sunday’s episode of “The Simpsons.”
Bart: “How ya doin’, Mr. Assange?”
Julian: “That’s my personal information, and you have no right to know about it.”
Bada-bing.
The Army private accused of divulging three-quarters of a million secret documents to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning — who was at first kept in such inhumane custody that the State Department spokesman quit in protest — is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on charges that could mean life in prison. You don’t have to excuse his alleged crime to think the original sin in the whole drama is that this tormented soul had access to so many secrets in the first place.
What we cannot know for sure is the fate of the many informants, dissidents, activists and bystanders quoted in the American cables. Assange published source names over the strong objections of the journalists who had access to the data (we expunged the names from our reports) and to the horror of human rights groups and some of his WikiLeaks colleagues. I’ve been told that a few exposed sources fled their countries with American help, a few others were detained by authorities, and none are known to have been killed. But would we even know? When I read stories like the Reuters account last week of the three men beheaded in Yemen for giving information to Americans, I worry anew about the many innocent witnesses named in the WikiLeaks cables.
The publication of so many confidences and indiscretions did not bring U.S. foreign policy to a halt. But it did, at least temporarily, complicate the lives of U.S. diplomats. American officials say that foreign counterparts are sometimes more squeamish about speaking candidly, and that it is harder to recruit and retain informants around the world.
As raw material for journalists, the cache of secrets has had a phenomenal afterlife. It’s been 10 months since The Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and the other partners in this project filed their last major extracts from the files. And still, literally every day, stories based on the trove appear somewhere in the world, either because local news organizations are catching up with morsels of scandal that did not attract major newsrooms, or because new events cast the cables in a more interesting light. Notably, State Department dispatches reporting on the dissolute lifestyles of Mideast autocrats provided a little extra kindling for the bonfires of the Arab Spring.
But the idea that this was the opening of a floodgate has proved exactly wrong. In the immediate aftermath of the breach, several news organizations (including this one) considered creating secure online drop-boxes for would-be leakers, imagining that new digital Deep Throats would arise. But it now seems clear that the WikiLeaks breach was one of a kind — and that even lesser leaks are harder than ever to come by.
Steven Aftergood, who monitors secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, said that since WikiLeaks the government has elevated the “insider threat” as a priority, and tightened access to classified material. Nudged by an irate Congress, the intelligence agencies are at work on an electronic auditing program that would make illicit transfer of secrets much more difficult and make tracking the leaker much easier.
“A lot of attention has been focused on WikiLeaks and its colorful proprietors,” Aftergood told me. “But the real action, it turns out, is not at the publisher level; it’s at the source level. And there aren’t a lot of sources as prolific or as reckless as Bradley Manning allegedly was.”
For good reason. The Obama administration has been much more aggressive than its predecessors in pursuing and punishing leakers. The latest case, the arrest last month of John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. terrorist-hunter accused of telling journalists the names of colleagues who participated in the waterboarding of Qaeda suspects, is symptomatic of the crackdown. It is this administration’s sixth criminal case against an official for confiding to the media, more than all previous presidents combined. The message is chilling for those entrusted with keeping legitimate secrets and for whistleblowers or officials who want the public to understand how our national security is or is not protected.
Here’s the paradox the documentaries have overlooked so far: The most palpable legacy of the WikiLeaks campaign for transparency is that the U.S. government is more secretive than ever.
