Analysing Arguments against Wikileaks (Privacy I)

In this and subsequent postings, I will survey some of the arguments towards the conclusion that Wikileaks, or more precisely, its publication of the Cablegate cables, is a bad thing. For brevity, I'll refer to this publication as WCP from here on. I will deal with these arguments one per blog posting. This is mainly because I expect each discussion to blow out.

I should confess my own position at this point -- I do support Wikileaks and WCP, and consequently will be applying what acid I can to the arguments presented. But I won't be trying to prove that WCP is a good thing, that's a whole other set of arguments.

Argument from Sympathetic Privacy
Argued by: Joanna Bryson (blog), Theodore Dalrymple (City Journal), Dr Wes (Get Better Health), various commenters (Ethika Politika)

Informally, the argument runs as follows. The cables are messages being sent between persons doing their everyday jobs for the US State Department. These cables were not intended by their authors or recipients for general publication, hence their classification. Imagine if all your work emails and conversations were posted on the web for all to see. That would be bad. So WCP is bad.


Not all of the links cited above are to documents that present this argument with the same level of clarity or explicitness, but they all express their concern for privacy in what-if-it-happened-to-you terms.

The argument, like most in informal discussion, is not valid as stated (not a criticism - trying to make arguments valid is time consuming and often tedious). To justify the conclusion that WCP is bad, we need to tighten up its language and express some previously implicit assumptions.

1. The cables are written communications between colleagues which they did not wish published.
2. You are like the authors of of the cables in all relevant ways.
3. You have written communications with your colleagues which you do not wish published.
4. If someone published these communications, that would be bad.
5. If something is bad when it happens to you, then it is bad when it happens to someone like you in all relevant ways.
6. Therefore WCP is bad.

If someone wants to avoid the conclusion that the publications were bad, then they need to deny at least one of these five assumptions. What's more, most of them seem pretty impervious to denial. Premiss (1) is a factual description of the nature of the cables as written communications. The same premiss says that the authors did not intend their publication, which most would accept as an immediate consequence of the classification they were given (SECRET).

Premiss (2) will be left till last as it is the premiss I am going to question.

Premiss (3) is true, I would presume, for all of us. We may not want our communications revealed because (a) they might show we're doing something we shouldn't be, (b) they include necessarily candid evaluations of persons not party to their interests, (c) they relate to trade secrets, (d) they include information which could be used to damage our employer or own business (like passwords), or for many other reasons.

The fourth premiss almost follows from the third, at least if we are sufficiently egotistical. If something happens which we did not wish, then that would be bad. A trifle less subjectively, a leaked email with passwords, for instance, or a hasty remark about a problem client, could lead to substantial business consequences if published widely. So this is also a strong premiss.

The last assumption (before we return to premiss 2) is a version of the well-known Golden Rule (also known as the ethic of reciprocity): but instead of talking about how you treat others, it's more about how you would wish them treated in abstracto. Some may be a little puzzled by the rider in the statement of the rule here like you in all relevant ways. This is to deal with things that should happen to people because of some attribute of their own or their environment which is different to our own. For example, a billionaire should not expect state support while an impoverished person might because we regard the difference between them, their wealth, as relevant to the happening, in this case the provision of state support. Likewise, those of us who have committed no crime would regard our own arrest as bad, while seeing the arrest of a murderer as good. So this limitation to like you in all relevant ways is important.

These four assumptions seem unassailable. So any contesting of this argument can only be had in the second premiss: that the authors of the cables are like us in all relevant ways. In the context of WCP, relevance refers to the reasons for publishing confidential written communications. In these terms, we can flesh out the assumption a little more: US State Department employees are just like me with regards to any reason for publishing confidential written communications.


So in order to avoid the conclusion that WCP is bad, while remaining consistent, I have to maintain that US State Department employees are not just like me with regards to any reason for publishing confidential written communications. So how might I think we differ in ways relevant to publication?

Let me suggest two:

1. They are projecting the might of a superpower through influence and negotiations that affect the lives of thousands and sometimes millions, while I am not.
2. While acting as representatives of very many people, they routinely keep their acts secret from those people, while I do not.

For me, these differences are sufficient to break down the ethic of reciprocity between me and US State Department representatives. There is a lineto be drawn between the casual and ruthless invasions of individual privacy (the stuff of traditional tabloid media) and the pursuit of information about the influences great powers are exerting over our lives.

But there's another question to be asked here. Is Wikileaks itself (or at least Julian Assange) immune from the argument from sympathetic privacy? Or if it was explained to them would they respond: Damn! I wish I'd thought of that. I better stop what I'm doing and pack up shop. The question boils down to whether they differentiate themselves categorically from the people they leak about.

When asked (during this Ted Talk about 10min in) whether there have been any leaks from Wikileaks yet, Assange responds: We don't have dissidents. That is at least one difference between them and persons party to the US State Department secrets, and it is a difference crucially relevant to the process of leaking.

So this argument doesn't get me to the conclusion that WCP is bad, because I don't see my role as similar to that of the people whose communications have been leaked.