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T H E W I L S O N Q U A R T E R LY

The WikiLeaks
Illusion
WikiLeaks’ tsunami of revelations from U.S. government sources
last year did not change the world, but it did change WikiLeaks.

BY ALASDAIR ROBERTS

Late last November, the antisecrecy group casualties and “friendly fire” incidents. In October came
WikiLeaks achieved the greatest triumph in its short his- a similar but larger set of documents—almost
tory. A consortium of major news media organizations— 400,000—detailing U.S. military operations in Iraq.
including The New York Times, The Guardian, Der WikiLeaks’ boosters said that the group was waging
Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País—began publishing a war on secrecy, and by the end of 2010 it seemed to be
excerpts from a quarter-million cables between the U.S. winning. The leaks marked “the end of secrecy in the old-
State Department and its diplomatic outposts that Wiki- fashioned, Cold War–era sense,” claimed Guardian jour-
Leaks had obtained. The group claimed that the cables nalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. A Norwegian
constituted “the largest set of confidential documents politician nominated WikiLeaks for the Nobel Peace
ever to be released into the public domain.” The Prize, saying that it had helped “redraw the map of
Guardian predicted that the disclosures would trigger information freedom.” “Like him or not,” wrote a Time
a “global diplomatic crisis.” magazine journalist in December, WikiLeaks founder
This was the fourth major disclosure orchestrated by Julian Assange had “the power to impose his judgment
WikiLeaks last year. In April, it had released a classified of what should or shouldn’t be secret.”
video showing an attack in 2007 by U.S. Army helicop-
ters in the streets of Baghdad that killed 12 people,

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including two employees of the Reuters news agency. In id the leaks of 2010 really mark the end of “old-
July, it had collaborated with the news media consortium fashioned secrecy?” Not by a long shot. Certainly,
on the release of 90,000 documents describing U.S. new information technologies have made it eas-
military operations in Afghanistan from 2004 through ier to leak sensitive information and broadcast it to the
2009. These records included new reports of civilian world. A generation ago, leaking was limited by the need to
physically copy and smuggle actual documents. Now it is a
Alasdair Roberts, a former Woodrow Wilson Center fellow, is Rappa-
port Professor of Law and Public Policy at Suffolk University Law School. matter of dragging, dropping, and clicking Send. But there
His books include Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information are still impressive barriers to the kind of “radical trans-
Age (2006) and The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Archi-
tecture of Government (2010). parency” WikiLeaks says it wants to achieve. Indeed, the

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compared it to perhaps the most

famous leak in history. “The Pentagon
Papers was about 10,000 pages,” he
told the United Kingdom’s Channel 4
News, alluding to the secret Pentagon
history of America’s involvement in
Vietnam that was leaked in 1971. By
contrast, there were “about 200,000
pages in this material.”
The Afghan war logs did not hold
the record for long. In October, they
were supplanted by the Iraq disclo-
sures, “the greatest data leak in the
history of the United States military,”
according to Der Spiegel. Within
weeks, WikiLeaks was warning that
this record too would soon be shat-
tered. It boasted on Twitter that its
next release, the State Department
cables, would be “7x the size of the
Iraq War Logs.” Indeed, it was “an
astonishing mountain of words,” said
the two Guardian journalists. “If the
tiny memory stick containing the
cables had been a set of printed texts,
it would have made up a library con-
taining more than 2,000 sizable
books.”
Gauging the significance of leaks
based on document volume involves
a logical fallacy. The reasoning is this:
If we are in possession of a larger
WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange stares out from a poster championing the organization’s cause. number of sensitive documents than
ever before, we must also be in pos-
WikiLeaks experience shows how durable those barriers are. session of a larger proportion of the total stockpile than ever
Let’s begin by putting the leaks in proper perspective. A before. But this assumes that the total itself has not changed
common way of showing their significance is to emphasize over time.
the sheer volume of material. In July 2010, The Guardian In fact, the amount of sensitive information held within
described the release of the Afghan war documents as “one the national security apparatus is immensely larger than it
of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history.” Assange, an Aus- was a generation ago. Technological change has caused an
tralian computer programmer and activist who had founded explosion in the rate of information production within gov-
WikiLeaks in 2006 (and is currently in Britain facing extra- ernment agencies, as everywhere else. For example, the
dition to Sweden on rape and sexual molestation charges), leaked State Department cables might have added up to

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about two gigabytes of data—one-quarter of an eight- friendly to the United States. In fact, the reaction was neg-
gigabyte memory card. By comparison, it has been esti- ligible. “No one cared,” writes Domscheit-Berg, “because the
mated that the outgoing Bush White House transferred 77 subject matter was too complex.”
terabytes of data to the National Archives in 2009. That is As the British journalist John Lanchester recently
almost 10,000 memory cards for the White House alone. observed, WikiLeaks’ “release of information is unprece-
The holdings of other agencies are even larger. dented: But it is not journalism. The data need to be inter-
The truth is that a count of leaked messages tells us noth- preted, studied, made into a story.” WikiLeaks attempted to
do this itself when it released
the Baghdad helicopter
video. Assange unveiled the
WHEN WIKILEAKS released vast quanti- video at a news conference at
the National Press Club in
tites of undigested information, the public Washington, D.C., and pack-
aged it so that its significance
could not absorb it. would be clear. He titled it
Collateral Murder. The
edited video, WikiLeaks
ing about the significance of a breach. Only six percent of the said, provided evidence of “indiscriminate” and “unpro-
State Department cables that were leaked last year were clas- voked” killing of civilians.
sified as secret. And the State Department has said that the Even with this priming, the public reaction was muted.
network from which the cables were extracted was not Many people turned on WikiLeaks itself, charging that it
even the primary vehicle for disseminating its information. had manipulated the video to bolster its allegations of mil-
In the period in which most of the quarter-million Wiki- itary misconduct. “This strategy for stirring up public inter-
Leaks cables were distributed within the U.S. government, est was a mistake,” Domscheit-Berg agrees. “A lot of people
a State Department official said, “we disseminated 2.4 mil- [felt] . . . that they were being led around by the nose.”
lion cables, 10 times as many, through other systems.” The release of the Afghan war documents in July 2010
The 2010 disclosures also revealed fundamental prob- gave WikiLeaks further evidence of its own limitations.
lems with the WikiLeaks project. The logic that initially The trove of documents was “vast, confusing, and impossi-
motivated Assange and his colleagues was straightforward: ble to navigate,” according to The Guardian’s Leigh and
WikiLeaks would post leaked information on the Internet Harding, “an impenetrable forest of military jargon.” Fur-
and rely on the public to interpret it, become outraged, thermore, the logs contained the names of many individu-
and demand reform. The antisecrecy group, which at the als who had cooperated with the American military and
start of last year had a core of about 40 volunteers, had great whose lives could be threatened by disclosure. WikiLeaks
faith in the capacity of the public to do the right thing. recognized the need for a “harm minimization” plan but
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was WikiLeaks’ spokesman lacked the field knowledge necessary to make good decisions
until he broke with Assange last fall, explained the reason- about what should be withheld.
ing in Inside WikiLeaks, a book published earlier this year:
“If you provide people sufficient background information,

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they are capable of behaving correctly and making the right y last summer, all of these difficulties had driven
decisions.” WikiLeaks to seek its partnership with news
This proposition was soon tested and found wanting. media organizations. The consortium that han-
When WikiLeaks released a series of U.S. military coun- dled the disclosures last fall provided several essential
terinsurgency manuals in 2008, Domscheit-Berg thought services for the group. It gave technical assistance in
there would be “outrage around the world, and I expected organizing data and provided the expertise needed to
journalists to beat down our doors.” The manuals described decode and interpret records. It opened a channel to gov-
techniques for preventing the overthrow of governments ernment officials for conversation about the implications

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of disclosing information that WikiLeaks itself was Iraq war documents. But these hopes were again disap-
unable to establish. Finally, of course, the news media pointed. In some polls, perceptions about the conduct of
organizations had the capacity to command public atten- the Afghan war actually became more favorable after the
tion. They were trusted by readers and possessed a skill WikiLeaks release. Meanwhile, opinion about American
in packaging information that WikiLeaks lacked. engagement in Iraq remained essentially unchanged, as
By the end of 2010, it was clear that WikiLeaks’ it had been for several years.
modus operandi had fundamentally changed. It had There are good reasons why disclosures do not nec-
begun with an unambiguous conception of its role as a essarily produce significant changes in policy or politics.
receiver and distributor of leaked information. At year’s Much depends on the context of events. When the Pen-
end, it was performing a different function: It still hoped tagon Papers came out in 1971, they contributed to pol-
to serve as a trusted receiver of leaks, but it was now icy change because a host of other forces were pushing
working with mainstream news media to decide how— in the same direction. The American public was
or if—leaked information ought to be published. For exhausted by the Vietnam War, which at its peak
WikiLeaks, this involved difficult concessions. “We were involved the deployment of almost four times as many
no longer in control of the process,” Domscheit-Berg later troops as are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Amer-
wrote. The outflow of leaked information was now con- icans were also increasingly skeptical of all forms of
strained by the newspapers’
willingness to invest money
and time in sifting through
more documents.
For the newspapers that
participated in the consor-
tium, the rationale for pub-
lishing leaked information was
simple. As The New York
Times explained in an editorial
note when the State Depart-
ment cables were released in
November, Americans “have a
right to know what is being
done in their name.” The
cables “tell the unvarnished
story of how the government
makes its biggest decisions.” WikiLeaks was forced to collaborate with traditional news organizations that could make sense of
This is the conventional jour- its revelations for the public. The Web, it discovered, is not an information utopia.
nalistic argument in defense
of disclosure, and there is no doubt that the WikiLeaks established authority. The federal government’s status
revelations provided vivid and sometimes disturbing was further tarnished by other revelations about abuses
illustrations of the ways in which power is wielded by the of power by the White House, CIA, and FBI.
United States and its allies. We live in very different times. There is no popular
WikiLeaks itself wanted bigger things to flow from movement against U.S. military engagement overseas,
its work. It continued to expect outrage and political no broad reaction against established authority in Amer-
action. Assange told Britain’s Channel 4 News last July ican society, no youth rebellion. The public mood in the
that he anticipated that the release of the Afghan war United States is one of economic uncertainty and phys-
documents would shift public opinion against the war. ical insecurity. Many Americans want an assurance that
There was a similar expectation following release of the their government is willing and able to act forcefully in

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WikiLeaks

lated its terms of service. The same day, a smaller

the pursuit of U.S. interests. In this climate, the incidents
revealed by WikiLeaks—spying on United Nations diplo- firm that provides online graphics capabilities,
mats, covert military action against terrorists, negotia- Tableau Software, discontinued its support. The firm
tions with regimes that are corrupt or guilty of human that managed WikiLeaks’ domain name,
rights abuses—might not even be construed as abuses of EveryDNS.net, also suspended services, so that the
power at all. On the contrary, they could be regarded as domain name wikileaks.org was no longer operable.
proof that the U.S. government is prepared to get its On December 20, Apple removed an application from
hands dirty to protect its citizens. its online store that offered iPhone and iPad users
Indeed, it could be said that WikiLeaks was doing the access to the State Department cables.
All of these actions
complicated WikiLeaks’
ability to distribute leaked
MANY OF WIKILEAKS’ revelations only information. Decisions by
other organizations also
confirmed things Americans already undermined its financial
viability. Five days after
suspected and were prepared to tolerate. the State Department dis-
closures, PayPal, which
manages online pay-
one thing Americans least wished for: increasing insta- ments, announced that it would no longer process
bility and their sense of anxiety. The more WikiLeaks dis- donations to WikiLeaks, alleging that the group had
closed last year, the more American public opinion hard- violated its terms of service by encouraging or facili-
ened against it. By December, according to a CNN poll, tating illegal activity. MasterCard and Visa Europe
almost 80 percent of Americans disapproved of Wiki- soon followed suit.
Leaks’ release of U.S. diplomatic and military docu- Critics alleged that these firms were acting in
ments. In a CBS News poll, most respondents said they response to political pressure, and many American
thought the disclosures were likely to hurt U.S. foreign legislators did in fact call on businesses to break with
relations. Three-quarters affirmed that there are “some WikiLeaks. But direct political pressure was hardly
things the public does not have a right to know if it necessary; cold commercial judgment led to the same
might affect national security.” decision. WikiLeaks produced little revenue for any
As WikiLeaks waited fruitlessly for public out- of these businesses but threatened to entangle all of
rage, it began to see another obstacle to the execution them in public controversy. A public-relations spe-
of its program. WikiLeaks relies on the Internet for the cialist told Seattle’s KIRO News that it was “bizarre”
rapid dissemination of leaked information. The for Amazon to assist WikiLeaks during a holiday sea-
assumption, which seemed plausible in the early days son: “I don’t think you mix politics with retail.” Worse
of cyberspace, is that the Internet is a vast global still, businesses were exposed to cyberattacks by
commons—a free space that imposes no barrier on the opponents of WikiLeaks within the hacker commu-
flow of data. But even online, commercial and politi- nity that disrupted their relationships with other,
cal considerations routinely compromise the move- more profitable clients.
ment of information. These business decisions hurt WikiLeaks signifi-
This reality was quickly illustrated after the release cantly. Assange said they amounted to “economic cen-
of the State Department cables on November 28. sorship” and claimed that actions by these financial
Three days later, Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary intermediaries were costing WikiLeaks $650,000 per
of Amazon.com that rents space for the storage of week in lost donations.
digitized information, stopped acting as a host for The leaks also provoked a vigorous reaction by the
WikiLeaks’ material, alleging that the group had vio- U.S. government. The Army came down hard on Pri-

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vate Bradley Manning, the apparent source of all ines are secrets are not really secrets at all. It may be
four of the 2010 disclosures, bringing 34 charges that what WikiLeaks revealed when it drew back the
against him. The most serious of these, aiding the curtain is more or less what most Americans already
enemy, could result in a death sentence, although suspected had been going on, and were therefore pre-
prosecutors have said they will not seek one. The pared to tolerate.
government is also investigating other individuals To put it another way, much of what WikiLeaks has
in connection with the leaks. Some in Congress have released might best be described as open secrets. It
used the episodes to argue for strengthening the law would have been no great shock to most Americans,
on unauthorized disclosure of national security infor- for example, to learn about the United States’ covert
mation, and federal agencies have tightened admin- activities against terrorists in Yemen. “The only sur-
istrative controls on access to sensitive information. prising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that
These steps, which may well produce a result pre- they contain no surprises,” says the noted Slovenian
cisely the opposite of what WikiLeaks intends by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a professor at the European
reducing citizens’ access to information about the Graduate School. “The real disturbance was at the
government, have been taken by an administration level of appearances: We can no longer pretend we
that promised on its first day in office to “usher in a don’t know what everyone knows we know.”
new era of open government.” In a sense, it was odd to expect that there would
be great surprises. The diplomatic and national secu-
rity establishment of the U.S. government employs

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ikiLeaks is predicated on the assumption millions of people. Most of the critical decisions about
that the social order—the set of struc- the development of foreign policy, and about the
tures that channel and legitimize power— apparatus necessary to execute that policy, have been
is both deceptive and brittle: deceptive in the sense made openly by democratically elected leaders, and
that most people who observe the social order are sanctioned by voters in national elections over the
unaware of the ways in which power is actually used, course of 60 years. In broad terms, Americans know
and brittle in the sense that it is at risk of collapse how U.S. power is exercised, and for what purpose.
once people are shown the true nature of things. The And so there are limits to what WikiLeaks can unveil.
primary goal, therefore, is revelation of the truth. In Even New York Times executive editor Bill Keller
the past it was difficult to do this, mainly because conceded that the disclosures did not “expose some
primitive technologies made it difficult to collect and deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places.” They pro-
disseminate damning information. But now these vide only “texture, nuance, and drama.”
technological barriers are gone. And once informa- None of this is an argument for complacency about
tion is set free, the theory goes, the world will change. government secrecy. Precisely because of the scale
We have seen some of the difficulties with this and importance of the national security apparatus, it
viewpoint. Even in the age of the Internet, there is no ought to be subjected to close scrutiny. Existing over-
such thing as the instantaneous and complete reve- sight mechanisms such as freedom of information
lation of the truth. In its undigested form, informa- laws and declassification policies are inadequate and
tion often has no transformative power at all. Raw should be strengthened. The monitoring capacity of
data must be distilled and interpreted, and the atten- news media outlets and other nongovernmental
tion of a distracted audience must be captured. The organizations must be enhanced. And citizens should
process by which this is done is complex and easily be encouraged to engage more deeply in debates about
influenced by commercial and governmental inter- the aims and methods of U.S. foreign policy. All of
ests. This was true before the advent of the Internet these steps involve hard work. There is no technolog-
and remains true today. ical quick fix. A major difficulty with the WikiLeaks
Beyond this, there is a final and larger problem. It project is that it may delude us into believing
may well be that many of the things WikiLeaks imag- otherwise. ■

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