Secrets in the age of WikiLeaks

If WikiLeaks is a revolution, then its leader, Julian Assange, is its chief revolutionary. (That, by the way, is not necessarily a good thing.) And the best evidence that he has achieved this status is the total paralysis he has induced among the current governing order. On the one hand, the U.S. government is certain that he is an enemy of the state. On the other hand, it is not even sure if it has the legal power to pursue him.

What makes Assange so confounding is that he has created a system that is outside the current governing structure. As Franklin knew, as long as there have been secrets, there have been people who have sought to expose them. But often these people were inhibited because they could not be assured anonymity or protection should they be discovered. WikiLeaks’ strong encryption is able to offer that anonymity to anyone in the world — regardless of whether their own country has laws that protect whistle-blowers. Before, the state could limit leaks by prosecuting anyone who was caught exposing secrets; now WikiLeaks has ensured that the state cannot even identify the culprit. (The man who leaked the U.S. diplomatic cables was discovered because he bragged to his friends.) This means that WikiLeaks is truly a law unto itself.

WikiLeaks’ stated goal is to expose the secrets of governments and institutions. But large institutions, from governments to corporations, all need secrets — or at least private discussions that are not shared with competitors — in order to function. In this sense, Assange is not only an enemy of the U.S. state: He is an enemy of all states and any large organization. And his political view — if he can be said to have a coherent one — is anarchy. As a measure of the level of chaos WikiLeaks can cause, consider this: Assange has released fewer than 1,000 of the over 250,000 cables he claims to have in his possession.

But Assange is more than just a political revolutionary; he is also the latest harbinger of a cultural revolution. Assange himself is highly secretive, so I doubt that he believes that personal secrets are bad simply because they are secrets. But the effect of his organization is to argue exactly that. Large institutions — such as social networking sites, banks and even our universities — all store our most sensitive information on the Web. This used not to concern me, as I believed that we could work within the system to protect our privacy of information on the Web. For example, public pressure seemed to stop Facebook from modifying its privacy policies so that it could sell personal information for money. But with WikiLeaks’ uncanny ability to infiltrate and expose the secrets of governments and corporations, it is now apparent that anyone with enough computer skills and good contacts can share our secrets with the world. Imagine, for example, a slightly less responsible version of WikiLeaks that simply released all files it obtained without redacting personal information.

In this light, WikiLeaks is a force that forces us to reevaluate whether anyone is entitled to secrets. If transparency is good for big organizations, why not in our personal lives as well? It’s a new cultural value that promotes radical openness and a life that is intimately involved in the community: Everyone should have access to everything.

I am not so pessimistic as to say that we are destined for a truly anarchic society in which even our most personal secrets are public information. After all, history is full of surprising twists and turns. But one of the things that I find most troubling about Assange’s revolution is that we cannot even choose sides in favor or against his cause. It seems to have been foisted upon us by an army of savvy techies. We mere mortals must live with the consequences.

Thomas Jefferson, to invoke another wise founding father, once noted, “Every generation needs a revolution.” If this one is ours, I suppose I have no choice but to hope it is a good one.

Adam Bradlow is an anthropology major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at abradlow@princeton.edu.