[governance] enhanced consultations - further inputs

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> Are you going to answer my question, (to wit; Can I steal your
> documents and publish them online as part of my FOE?) ...or should I
> give up?
> 

I'll answer this. 

At the legal level: In the US there are well-established legal precedents regarding journalists and their sources which basically say, "it's your job, government, to protect your information; if you fail at that and a journalist gets their hands on some juicy stuff that puts you in a bad light, you can prosecute the leaker but not the publisher." See NY Times and the Pentagon papers case. The complication with Wikileaks is that it is not a traditional journalist. To some of us, that doesn't matter. 

At a normative level, if "your documents" refers to a government that is supposed to derive its legitimacy from the people and those documents reveal seriously unethical or illegal behavior with real or potential ill effects on the public, then I believe that a whistle-blower is justified in leaking them and think we owe them a debt of gratitude for taking the risks to do so. Unless you believe that ITforChange holds some kind of global public trust and/or that its actions are seriously damaging, and criminal or unethical in a way that _requires_ public exposure, then I see no justification in your stealing their docs and publishing them. 

Accordingly I do not support Lieberman's actions or Amazon's cowardly compliance (though I understand Amazon's motives). This is all about maintaining the trappings and illusions of US power, nothing more. This is about asserting their pride and arrogance at our diplomat's ability to "operate" unaccountably. It shakes them up in a way that they really need to have done. The dialogue around this issue here in the US is ridiculous: the rightwingers try to portray Assange not as an advocate of transparency and information freedom but as an "enemy of the United States" and call for the death penalty. So there is a very clear clash here between the nation-state paradigm, the competition among states for supremacy, and the openness of information associated with the internet. I hope everyone here understands where I stand on that one. 

Of course, public disclosure of information can be abused, it would be silly not to admit that, too. Think of the college student who videotaped his closeted roommate in a gay encounter and put it on Facebook. For every new capability opened up by the internet there are new problems.

This IS a freedom of expression issue _and_ it is a national security issue, _and_ it is potentially a privacy issue.

--MM

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