WikiLeaks is Not Your Friend
Whether concerning US drone strikes in the Middle East, Freedom of Information Act requests, or government treatment of whistleblowers, the Obama administration has not taken very kindly to government transparency, despite promises to the contrary early on during Obama’s tenure. Enter WikiLeaks, the rogue organization of activists, hackers, and journalists dedicated to exposing government secrets, especially those pertaining to “war, spying and corruption.”
WikiLeaks first grabbed the national spotlight by releasing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and other classified materials obtained by US Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning back in 2010. While these were certainly embarrassing to nations involved, they shed much needed light on negotiations that are often part and parcel in diplomatic circles but hidden from the public eye, like those involving the Trans Pacific Partnership. More importantly they highlighted an as of yet hidden uglier side to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some even attribute the Arab Spring in part to their work.
Whatever purpose the leaks were intended to serve, WikiLeaks worked with established, mainstream news outlets such as The Guardian and The New York Times to vet their material and redact anything that could be considered harmful before public release. They even went so far as to reportedly ask the State Department for assistance (though they were denied). WikiLeaks exercised a degree of responsibility with the information they had access to, but recently this is no longer the case.
Exhibit Number One: WikiLeaks and the DNC. In July, WikiLeaks released thousands of DNC emails obtained from Hillary Clinton’s personal email server through likely Russian hackery. The leaks were timed to coincide with the Democratic national convention for maximum effect, and were terribly embarrassing for the DNC, resulting in the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Regardless, no illegal activities were uncovered.
Assuming that Republicans are no strangers to backroom deals themselves, one has to wonder why WikiLeaks would choose to dive into the mud of election year partisan politics, let alone single out a candidate that has far more in common with their ideals than the opposition ever would. After all, Republicans are the party of voting rights restrictions that target minorities, gerrymandering of congressional House districts, the Southern Strategy, and a demagogical presidential candidate who already gets enough attention and shall not be named. Julian Assange, the de facto editor of WikiLeaks, labeled Hillary Clinton as a “personal foe,” a “war hawk with bad judgement,” and a “demon that is going to put nooses around everyone’s necks as soon as she wins the election.” Why would Assange allow the integrity of the organization to be violated by something so petty as a personal vendetta?
Furthermore, WikiLeaks doesn’t appear to be working with news outlets in the same capacity as they had had before, and it shows. The DNC emails were far from vetted before release — the personal information of thousands of DNC donors, including social security numbers, bank account numbers, and email addresses weren’t redacted, breaching the privacy of thousands.
And assuming they were aware of the means with which the emails were obtained, why would WikiLeaks release information strongly suspected of being obtained by an actor, Russia, with less-than-savory, anti-democratic motives? A foreign power interfering in a US election is rather unprecedented, so why would WikiLeaks want to be complicit in that?
It gets worse. After teasing for weeks the release of a trove of emails from the AKP, the party of increasingly authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (who was recently the subject of a failed coup attempt), it turned out that most of what they had were innocuous content from some Google message boards. When this was pointed out by an analyst, WikiLeaks released another cache containing the personal information of millions of female AKP voters, thereby subjecting innocent civilians to the danger of recriminations in a country fraught with political turmoil.
Just last month, WikiLeaks further released a massive data dump from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that included the names of LGBT persons and rape victims, as well as the private medical records of individuals. With respect to the former, LGBT civil rights in Saudi Arabia, a hyper-conservative Islamic kingdom, are non-existent; homosexuality is deeply suppressed, and homosexual acts are punishable by anything from lashes, chemical castration, to execution.
Assange had expressed that WikiLeaks practices a “harm reduction” policy in regards to their releases, and to be fair, they have often removed sensitive information once it was pointed out. But the damage has already been done. WikiLeaks’s recent behavior betrays an organization supposedly committed to the protection of individual privacy in favor of reckless political activism. Even Edward Snowden has criticized Wikileaks on Twitter following one of their dumps, writing:
While we can and should argue for increased transparency in government, there are more effective ways to accomplish this, namely by protecting whistleblowers instead of prosecuting them when they expose legitimate cases of government wrongdoing. Pardoning Snowden would go a long way as well. A true journalistic entity (which WikiLeaks no doubt fashions itself as) would not be as careless with data that could have a detrimental effect on innocent people named within it. At its best, WikiLeaks is a platform for gigabits of often innocuous, sometimes useful data, released for the sake of speaking truth to power and a misapplied notion that all information wants to be free. At its worst, it is an irresponsible organization that instead of working in the best interests of those it claims to protect, harms them. We can do better.
