Latest update August 20th, 2026 12:07 AM
Ethics and Leaking
Last week the internet demonstrated it’s the power of global connectivity when a blogger, Aaron Bady, took the mainstream media by storm to identify the method behind WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s “madness” by deconstructing two of the latter’s papers. His thesis has implications for our own Guyana, where many believe that the Government’s obdurate refusal to enact a Freedom of Information Act is simply only one symptom of its deeply authoritarian nature.
Bady distinguishes Assange’s approach from both the anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes “information wants to be free” and the muckraker’s vicious amorality to “publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so.” He notes that Assange “begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, (as Assange) argues, a conspiracy:
‘Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behaviour as conspiratorial.’
The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.
For Assange, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. He decides that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment.
The idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defence, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire.
Assange quotes Theodore Roosevelt: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.”
All states are basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time. Simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about.
Assange, who has now been arrested in England on allegations of rape, views his leaks as more than free information as its own reward or free information that will lead the people to demand change. He wants to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and “governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims.”
A Government that is doing the right thing should not be afraid of leaks: those that are not must become afraid of leaks.
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