Peter Singer on WikiLeaks

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has chimed in on the WikiLeaks affair, noting that if citizens are kept in the dark about their government's activities, they cannot hold it to account. Ultimately, he hopes that the WikiLeaks cables move us closer to open diplomacy:

Some of the leaked cables are just opinion, and not much more than gossip about national leaders. But, because of the leak, we know, for example, that when the British government set up its supposedly open inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war, it also promised the US government that it would "put measures in place to protect your interests". The British government appears to have been deceiving the public and its own parliament.

Similarly, the cables reveal that President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen lied to his people and parliament about the source of US airstrikes against al-Qaida in Yemen, telling them that Yemen's military was the source of the bombs.

We have also learned more about the level of corruption in some of the regimes that the US supports, like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in other countries with which the US has friendly relations, notably Russia. We now know that the Saudi royal family has been urging the US to undertake a military attack on Iran to prevent it from becoming capable of producing nuclear weapons. Here, perhaps, we learned something for which the US government deserves credit: it has resisted that suggestion.

Knowledge is generally considered a good thing; so, presumably, knowing more about how the US thinks and operates around the world is also good. In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions. Even in non-democratic countries, people have a legitimate interest in knowing about actions taken by the government.

More.

Globe and Mail on 'The utopian dream of total openness'

Neat article by Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail: "Just watch us: The utopian dream of total openness." In discussing the trend towards broader transparency, Saunders draws some interesting parallels between 19th century Benthanmites and 21st century WikiLeakians. The comparisons are quite startling and revealing.

It's interesting to note that parliamentary debates were held in complete privacy 200 years ago. It was believed that public access to debates would damage national security. The Benthamites wanted it open, however, and their agenda was pushed by free-information radicals such as London mayor Brass Crosby, who helped publishers use illegal mass document leaks (in the form of then-illegal transcripts) to force parliamentary debates into the public. Their language, notes Saunders, is almost identical to words recently uttered by defenders of WikiLeaks and the Cablegate affair.

I find this fascinating; on the other side of the debate, today's governments are essentially arguing along the same lines as their 19th century forebears, that it's in the public's best interest to not know all the wheelings and dealings that go on behind closed doors. While a part of me realizes that classified documents need to remain classified for a reason—namely to prevent overt security risks—another part of me welcomes the peeling back of yet another privacy layer that enables the citizenry to keep a watchful eye on the government they elected to ensure that it remains accountable to them. The 'national security' excuse for confidentiality is likely a cop-out in 99% of the cases; it's a convenient way for governments to hide their activities from a questioning public and press.

Saunders also provides interesting commentary on changing perceptions of privacy and how Facebook and WikiLeaks are part of a broader trend. Both WikiLeaks and Facebook, argues Saunders, recognize that the individual leaks or postings aren't important—it doesn't matter whether profound secrets or ordinary banalities are revealed. "Rather," he writes, "it's the change in human behaviour produced by the possibility of exposure."

Saunders elaborates:

Bentham didn't just want privacy to break down between government and its citizens (or prisoners). He believed that ending privacy would actually make guards, police and many government agencies unnecessary, because citizens would do the observing.

“The doors of all public establishments ought to be thrown wide open to the body of the curious at large – the great open committee of the tribunal of the world,” he wrote, noting that the breakdown of privacy would create not only moral behaviour among those observed, but entertainment for those doing the watching: “The scene [in a prison],” he wrote, “though a confined, would be a very various, and therefore, perhaps, not altogether an unamusing one.”

We are now living in the world Jeremy Bentham dreamed about. It's not just that our technologies, from GPS-equipped cellphones to social-media accounts to ubiquitous CCTV cameras to full-body scanners, give us the ability to see almost anything about anyone. A great many of us, maybe a majority, have come to believe that privacy is not so much a right or a luxury but a bad idea, a social evil.
...

But it is not as if open windows benefit only public employees – or, conversely, that government workers should be the only ones to endure the constant probability of surveillance.

If that weren't clear enough, another huge story of 2010 made it so. The mass rape of children by Roman Catholic priests, formerly thought to be a constellation of tragic instances in a handful of countries, crystallized this year into a terrible whole, encompassing hundreds of priests in scores of countries and overlooked by a tolerant Vatican.

What brought these crimes to widespread attention was a new-found belief in exposing private traumas to the wider world, in invading the privacy of a formerly holy occupation – in short, in thousands of people engaging in a new set of behaviours of which Facebook and WikiLeaks form only a small part.

Will this new transparency actually provoke us all to be better citizens? We know that Bentham's prisons didn't change behaviours. One of the largest-scale uses of Panopticon prisons was by Fidel Castro to imprison thousands of democrats after he seized power in 1959; there's no indication they changed their behaviour.

Have the Cablegate leaks changed government behaviour? It's too early to tell, though we do know that Parliament was unquestionably improved by Brass Crosby driving it into the public eye, and that the end of the Vietnam War was provoked by the very Cablegate-like Pentagon Papers. Constantly watched governments do seem to behave better.

What about the private sphere? Have the revelations of rape changed the behaviour of priests? We may not know for a generation. But we do know that the news of these abuses, spread across a million social-media outlets, has caused a great many people to abandon the church, which may be a larger good. They have found a new god, after all. And it is them.

Entire article.

WikiLeaks futureshock as radical presentism

I've been thinking a lot lately about Cory Doctorow's radical presentism, the notion that science fiction is essentially an extrapolation and commentary on present conditions. It's consequently a way for us to reflect on contemporary life and how, in very profound and disruptive ways, we already dwell in a kind of 'future world.'

Certainly, the present moment is yesterday's future. And what Doctorow suggests is that it should often be interpreted, analyzed and celebrated through that lens. If we never stop and think about the present moment as a kind of 'future attained', then we will forever be looking forward to something out of our grasp, as something perpetually elusive. The future is, by definition, a time that we can never reach. Thus, it would be prudent of us to frequently take pause and reflect on the present. This will not only enhance our appreciation of our society and how we're adapting to technological and sociological change, but it will also inform our predicative abilities.

Indeed, radical presentism can also indicate the ways in which we are having difficulty adapting to changing conditions. As Charlie Stross recently observed, we are right smack dab in the middle of a Tofflerian futureshock. We need to be aware of this to understand why we feel so unsettled and why we don't seem to have a firm grasp or acceptance of new social norms. Doing so will also help us to avoid knee-jerk reactionary behavior and contrarianism.

Take the recent WikiLeaks controversy. Now that's futureshock. The whistle-blowing site is freaking people out on account of its ability to make sensitive information highly accessible (a progression for freedom of speech), the way in which it represents the next stage of (unfiltered) information gathering and reporting (a progression for freedom of the press), its function as a governmental watch-dog (a progression for democratic accounability), and how it's proving impossible to shut-down (unprecedented informational resilience due to novel technologies, in this case the highly distributed and redundant nature of the internet). Not to mention the fact that it's a bold step in the direction of the transparent society. Participatory panopticon, anyone? Sousveillance. Pick your term; it's happening.

Other examples of radical presentism applied include such things as the dramatic appearance of seemingly miraculous technological gadgetry (e.g. iPad, GPS) and convergent technologies (e.g. augmented reality). It was not too long ago that devices of this nature were considered quite futuristic. But they're here.

Radical presentism also helps us identify how social networking, communications technologies, and the web in general have altered intra- and interpersonal behaviour. We are becoming progressively networked, but at the same time suffering from decreased attention spans and internet addiction. The informational demands on our brains are through the roof; the amount of data a single person is processing in a single day is nothing short of astounding.

So, give it a try. Apply radical presentism to your daily life and discover the future in the moment. I guarantee you'll see things through a different lens, one that will help you appreciate how we're living in a kind of future world—and how we're coping with accelerating change.