Secret Sharers: In an Age of Leaks, Forgeries, and Internet Hoaxes, Archivists Must Guard Our Information While Keeping Hackers
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On November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the elusive head of the organization WikiLeaks, stormed into the London offices of The Guardian to confront the newspaper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger. For months, WikiLeaks had been exclusively supplying The Guardian, The New York Times, and Germany’s Der Spiegel with hundreds of thousands of leaked classified dispatches from the fronts of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Editors from the three publications had been allowed to sift through the documents, assess their authenticity and veracity, then publish stories based on the material (though not before WikiLeaks dumped the documents on its website). The arrangement represented a sensational news coup, the ultimate exercise of the power of a free press. But over the course of several months, Assange’s relationship with the editors became strained. He was especially furious with the Times (in part because the paper ran an unflattering front-page story on Assange), so much so that when he provided The Guardian in October with another massive collection of documents—250,000 diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies—Assange demanded that the information not be shared with the Times. He had other grievances as well. And when he arrived at Rusbridger’s office in November, he had worked himself into a rage.
During the contentious eight-hour meeting that ensued, Rusbridger—along with Georg Mascolo, the editor of Der Spiegel, and Times editor Bill Keller, who had joined the conversation by telephone—expressed the journalists’ own frustrations, namely that WikiLeaks activists were sharing data files with a widening circle of outlets, resulting in a series of rogue leaks that violated the terms of the agreement. Each side accused the other of illegally appropriating what was perceived to be exclusive property. Tempers flared, threats were made, wine was poured to calm everyone down. In the end, however, the journalists and Assange recognized the irony of accusing each other of theft. As Mascolo pointed out, allof the documents had originally been obtained illegally.
The group was confronting a question that archivists face every day: Who controls information? Archivists, trained to open some government records and embargo others, are simultaneously charged with providing access to information and protecting confidentiality. From an archivist’s perspective, the larger question that arose during the WikiLeaks episode, quite apart from who got to publish what, was whether anybody was ethically justified in publishing the document cache at all. Perhaps not surprisingly, responses among archivists spanned the spectrum of public opinion. Many said that information just wants to be free, and that all efforts at censorship are doomed by the ease with which secrets can be posted these days. Others feared the disruptive consequences, intended or otherwise, of revealing confidential communications and even welcomed a counterattack by governments to take back control of information and protect it with firewalls and enhanced security. Indeed, over time, my own opinion has oscillated from the libertarian to the protectionist, ultimately coming to rest somewhere in the middle.