WikiLeaks has set fire to the debate over information, secrecy, and journalism. Photograph of a burned DVD by Flickr user NightRPStar (CC-usage). Click on it to watch a CNet debate.

Unless you’ve been living on Mars, by now you’ve probably heard about the leak of a huge cache of American digital military logs by the enigmatic website, WikiLeaks.  It’s stirring a heated debate in journalism, intelligence, and legal circles.  This is an important one for the world to have because operations like WikiLeaks may be changing the way journalists and sources, as well as governments and citizens, relate to information.

It’s all the more important for Central Asia.  For one, because Afghanistan is more than just tangentially connected to the region.  What’s been happening there has had direct repercussions on the former Soviet republics, from instability in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the wranglings over the Manas airbase, both hidden and public, between the US and Russia.  Hence, Central Asians should be intensely interested in the conduct of the war there.

For another, neweurasia‘s bloggers have been exploring the importance of the online world for the real world.  In particular, our Turkmenistan blogger Annasoltan, has written about seen some deep metaphysical importance for the internet in her nation. During the tragic events in southern Kyrgyzstan, our Kyrgyz language blogger, Mirsulzhan, and I worried whether services like Twitter, which had become a veritable rumor mill, was not only compromising journalistic credibility, but instigating more violence.

We’re curious to know your opinions about the power and appropriateness of certain kinds of information, whether what WikiLeaks has done is a good or bad thing, and whether you’d like to see them expand into your nation in Central Asia or would be worried if they did.  State your opinion by leaving a comment below! You can also answer this survey on my personal blog.

In the hope of prodding discussion, I claim editor’s privilege to fire the opening shot.  Incidentally, I was actually able to speak yesterday with the website’s founder, Julian Assange, in a phone interview on behalf of RFE/RL.  It was a brief conversation, unsatisfactory to the philosopher in me but satisfactory for my immediate journalistic needs.   So, what follows are my two manat.  You can skip over them if you just want to comment straight away.

To begin with, there’s the specific leak.  On the one hand, the content in and of itself doesn’t appear to be particularly explosive.  Rather, it confirms what reporters and analysts have been saying for a long time, namely, that the Taliban is stronger than US officials want to admit (perhaps even to themselves), it’s receiving material assistance from Pakistan’s intelligence service, civilian casualties are high and possibly misreported as insurgent kills, and so on.  WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, said it well during his news conference yesterday:

“I’m often asked this question.  What is the single most damning revelation?  What is the thing that is easily capturable, the single event, the single personality, the single mass killing?  That is not the real story of this material.  The real story of this material is that it’s war, it’s one damn thing after another.  It is the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the maimed people… This is the story of the war since 2004, and like most of the accidents that occur on the road are as results of cars, not of buses, most of the deaths are as a result of the everyday squalor of war, not the big incidents.”

On the other hand, the way in which their originally digital data was organized and distributed while still in Afghanistan, not to mention the logs’ wealth of references, could potentially reveal to the well-trained eye important aspects of the American military’s internal system of reporting and intelligence-gathering, key terminology, and the general psychology within the chain of command.  Along these lines, consider the point made by Joshua at Registan.net about whether there’s any actionable intelligence in the leak that insurgents could use.

One could argue, then, that the leak was either pointless or subversive.  With regards to the first notion, I think the sheer scale of the leak actually makes its otherwise mundane content powerful, that is, if one chooses to browse the logs.  That leads me to the second notion, which is more complex and about which I don’t think there is yet sufficient information available in the internet, with the notable exception of Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent article for the New Yorker.  I also didn’t get a chance to explore this more fully with Assange himself.

Yet, I also think focusing on Assange may skew the truth.  WikiLeaks is not his brainchild alone, although he is certainly its founder and guiding light.  As Khachadourian puts it, this entity is not so much an organization as a “media insurgency”, so we need to think of it as a kind of movement or part of a larger movement, one which Assange does not rule but leads to some extent.  From what can be seen on the outside by us non-participants, including from e-mails of its own that have been leaked on the website Cryptome, it’s very much consensus-oriented and founded upon libertarian ideals derived from the old guard of the Cypherpunk movement.

So, let’s treat WikiLeaks as an entity.  What do we see?  Judging from remarks made by the operation in their forewords to the Afghanistan war logs and the infamous video “Collateral Murder”, uncovering violence committed against civilians by American military forces is one of their great concerns.  However, because unearthing civilian casualties in Afghanistan entailed also revealing potentially sensitive information that may result in more casualties of both soldiers and civilians, clearly it cannot be their only or even primary concern.

Assange et al have been accused of seeking to undermine US hegemony.  However, considering the breadth and depth of leaks on their site, which range from China to Iran, the US is not their primary target.  Indeed, in my phone interview Assange explained that WikiLeaks has so far suffered more at the hands of Kenyan assailants than it has at American hands.  True to their libertarian spirit, then, their real target is government per se, or more accurately all undue authority, particularly the forces of inaccuracy and perhaps also ideology.

Yet, this may not be the entire picture.  I actually put the question to Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and ally of WikiLeaks, on Monday at the height of the news about the leaks.  She felt that what was really at stake was the very validity of war and the sanctity of the historical record.  Implicit in such a view is, of course, the principle of justice, again one construed anti-authoritarianly, with an instinctive distrust of secrecy.

To conclude, and speaking candidly, I’m of course sympathetic to WikiLeaks.  In general, the whole libertarian line of reasoning is difficult logic to refute once one concedes even a few of their premises; it is all the more powerful when it comes to journalism.  But what I worry about is the extent to which WikiLeaks is willing to make soldiers, civilians, even its own soldiers if not also itself, collateral damage in its war against inaccuracy and falsity.  That’s a question not only the journalist in me, but the philosopher too, would like to put to Assange et al one day…