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My friend Jeff Jonas wrote an excellent comment on my last blog article on Wikileaks in which he stated:

“Now with the Wikileaks disclosures it is clear the game has changed. Historically, public disclosure of classified data has been limited and infrequent – let’s even say, to a degree, tolerable. Contrast that with the scope of the recently leaked cables. At some point it may become intolerable. In which case, I will not be surprised if a number of governments around the world attempt to enact new, wide-sweeping, anti-leak legislation directed at not only those engaged in the initial theft of the data, but the distribution points (e.g., Wikileaks) and the publishers (e.g., the media). The principle being if one knowingly receives and benefits from stolen property, they are accomplices. This pendulum could swing so far (backwards) the future will have far fewer media leaks than the historical (tolerable) volumes – i.e., this whole fiasco resulting in less transparency and accountability.”

Referenced from: http://www.infogovcommunity.com/blog/2010/12/wikileaks-and-information-independence/#ixzz18aUDiHDu

I think Jeff is right that governments who don’t already have information controls  may be inclined to enact them to deter future leakers.  Julian Assange may well be brought to trial in the United States on charges that amount to espionage.  And many around the world may see that as a chilling result to a David and Goliath story about truth and secrecy.

But I don’t think that’s the end of it.  In fact, I think we are at the beginning of lots of leaks because there is no way to perfectly control leaks.  As long as human beings have had language, there have been secrets and leaks.  People love to communicate what they know, and there is no way to stop it.  Markets depend on information, and as long as there are people willing to buy and sell information there will be leaks.  And there are other leaking websites.  LiveLeak has been up for years.

There are to be sure, social, economic, and political costs to leaks, just as there are also social, economic, and political costs of secrecy.  Some countries even mandate leaks under law.  For example, in the United States, California and many other States have Security Breach Laws which mandate that organizations must disclose information about security breaches when they occur.  In that case, the goal of the policy is to warn individuals about the potential harm that may result from identity theft.  But the effect of the law is to force organizations to disclose information that is normally quite embarrassing (being hacked) and secret.  Since the law was passed the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse website has published the names of every company that has had a breach and how many customer records were stolen.  Its a leak law.

Whistleblower statutes exist in many laws, to empower and protect people who blow the whistle on unethical or illegal behavior they observe in their organizations.  They don’t always work well, but nations have enacted those laws to protect the people who leak sensitive or secret information that may have social, economic, and political benefits to disclose.  Normally, journalists learn of whistleblowers or leakers and use that information as sources for their articles.  Journalists are protected from having to reveal their sources, but those protections are often compromised by wiretapping and court mandates.

Wikileaks gave whistleblowers an alternative to journalists and newspapers.  And that makes Wikileaks more than just an “attack” on national secrecy.  Its also an important new attack on journalism.  Because when people can reveal dishonest, unethical, or illegal behavior as it happens or shortly thereafter without having to call a journalist or a news channel, the world has a new method to empower whistleblowers.

For example, just look at the recent disclosures of sexual child abuse in Catholic schools in Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and the United States.  In many cases, the abuse occurred decades ago and the victims are now adults.  Their stories and trauma are only now coming to light and church documentation verifying the abuses have been published after court subpoena.  For most of the victims, the disclosure is too late.  Many of the victims complained to the church of the abuses but their voices were silenced by public disbelief and church suppression.  But what if there had been a Wikileaks like website available decades ago where victims of abuse could have disclosed their stories and put pressure on the abusers to stop their abuses.

Why does it always take decades to discover the abuses that the powerful commit?  Don’t people deserve speedy justice? And aren’t we all safer in a transparent world?

Of course transparency and leaks do themselves offer opportunities for corruption.  Transparency doesn’t guarantee the truth, and we can all be poisoned by toxic content leaked through sites like Wikileaks.  These are problems we will have to work through – what can we believe, how to authenticate information and anonymous sources – because leaks aren’t going away.

The precedent has been set.  Wikileaks does change everything Jeff Jonas, because the world has had a taste of transparency and it likes the flavor.  Julian Assange may be prosecuted, but others have already learned lessons from his experience and they will copy the example without the mistakes.  And as leaking sites proliferate, leakers and whistleblowers the world over will discover the confessional liberation of public disclosure.  It won’t be pretty, but it will make a huge difference in the lives of people who’s suffering might otherwise go unheard, unheeded, and unwelcome.

But of course that won’t prevent others from trying to control and suppress leaks too.  That’s also human nature.

“From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.”  The New York Times reported that on October 1, 2010, which was the date that the USA acknowledged this event and apologized for it.  It took more than 50 years for that disgusting episode in US history to come to light, far too long to help any of the people infected with that disease at the time.

This morning the New York Times reports that the Obama Administration is considering bringing espionage charges against Wikileaks for their recent publication of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables.  The publication on their web site and through many newspapers and journals worldwide has created sharp opinion about the source and nature of the leaks.  Many argue that the Wikileaks disclosures have crossed a line and done more than embarrass the United States and its allies- it has jeopardized the lives of diplomats worldwide.

The espionage allegations hinge on the question of whether Wikileaks is acting as a journalist or as a spy.  Journalists collect information from sources and enjoy special protections in most constitutional democracies.  Spies solicit and pay for information and rarely have any protections.  In practice, the distinctions are often not so clear.  And it is perhaps on this point that the US Government hopes to make a case.  However, we should all be very wary of how such a case is made and prosecuted, because its result will say much about the state of Democracy, freedom of the press and speech, and the balance of information power in the USA.

In a dictatorship, journalists are treated like spies because dictatorial power depends upon the secrecy of misdeeds.  In some sense, the Internet has enabled every blogger, vlogger, and forum writer to become a journalist.  But it has also enabled nation states to spy on bloggers, vloggers, and the rest.  And the goal of that spying is to control information and protect power.

Power has its own self-sustaining interests, and ignorance is an important power maintenance tool.  Democracies persist when the self-interests of some human beings are allowed to regard what others wish to disregard,  to reveal what others wish to conceal.  This tension is not something we can or should take lightly and assume repression and control can only happen in repressive regimes with governments so named.  It can happen anywhere.

Democracy sits on a slender slice of history.  Not many countries have enjoyed democratic freedoms for more than a few hundred years.  The vast majority of nations have been ruled by other means.  And even within those few relatively long national democratic epochs, many dictatorial transgressions have taken place.  In the US we’ve experienced slavery, disenfranchisement of women in law, the near annihilation of the indigenous Indian population, the Alien and Sedition Act, Germans and Japanese Americans interred in concentration camps, radiation trials on citizens, McCarthyism, widespread ethnic and racial discrimination common even in the White House.  Other nations have witnessed mass killings (Germany, Ruanda, Sudan) and forced starvation (USSR, Ethiopia), complete pawning of the national economy (Zimbabwe, North Korea), and colonial mis-rule (United Kingdom in Africa and India).  Democracy and constitutional rights themselves are no guarantors of human rights or freedom.

The only guarantor is information. It is the white light that illuminates dark despotic corners of corruption.  Despots use information to control power, and free peoples depend on the unimpeded flow of information to maintain limits on the powerful.  The Internet has created a flow of information unparalleled in human history, yet that has not resulted in unparalleled freedom for most of the world’s population.

More information creates new dis-equilibriums and asymmetries that enable rich and powerful actors to mine and analyze much more information than the poor and powerless masses.  An example are the new computer systems used by Hedge Funds to analyze investor blogs and twitter tweets.  They use thousands of CPU’s to infer investment sentiment from tens of thousands of blogs daily and devise investment strategies that far outwit individual investors without such resources.  That kind of information analytical power creates an enormous competitive advantage for organizations that have it, and the example will be replicated by organizations with the wealth to use it in other industries.

Another example was the use by NYC Police of chat room monitoring and wiretapping in the year prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.  Over 5000 liberal organizers were had their communications monitored by the police as they organized their peaceful demonstrations.  Despite licenses from the City to protest outside the convention, 3000 of these protestors were arrested on the first day of the Convention and held in jail without charges or bail for a week.  There was no due process, and no disclosure until one day after the Convention had ended.

In any system of governance, there is always an asymmetrical balance between the freedom of information and power.  We the people have always depended on the brave and courageous among us who defended our rights to information and self-determination.  Those brave and courageous leaders fought tyranny in the 18th Century to create this nation, and then turned around and used that power to supress and subjugate more than half the population of North America (africans, indians, and women).

Most Americans learned something about slavery and indians in grade school, but that history was heavily biased and many to this day don’t know much about how those populations suffered and continue to suffer in this nation.  And few if any Americans had any appreciation of that suffering at the time it happened.  Multiculturalism and the publication of historical injustice to minorities through mass media is barely two decades old.

The mistreated and oppressed people around the world depend on the free flow of information to shine a light on their mistreatment in their lifetimes.

The Internet has enabled that flow of information for the first time in human history and we all should celebrate and protect the rights of information independence because it is the only safeguard we all have from power and oppression.

Watch the Obama Administration try to prosecute Wikileaks.  Its an important skirmish in the Information Wars and it will tell us all something important about the future of Information Independence, Freedom, and Democracy in the 21st Century.

The Winter Solstice is the time for Data Governance Predictions.  And here are mine for 2011:

Discussion is certainly wonderful. Steve’s responses to the “matrix model” model I posted before today’s call made me think of two features it lacked: (1) first, among the attributes associated with each category (or emphasis area) in the matrix should have been a additional dimension, entitled “interdependencies,” in which the connections with other emphasis areas could be identified and described, and (2) it should have been clear that within each dimension and category, the content would (or at least could) arise to some extent from crowdsourcing. Most crowd members probably would be affiliated with the subject matter area under discussion, but not necessarily so, and in fact some of the more interesting inputs might come from ‘outsiders’

Using the interdependency dimension, it might be possible to represent the information listed in the maturity model’s existing ‘support matrix’ (displayed on the website) in an interesting new context.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there, since the model’s value will be principally as a reference point rather than a blueprint, but I did want to mention this example of community discussion spurring extended consideration.

The community’s last conversation (on metadata repository, 11/17) crystalized some thoughts already brewing in my head on the high-level structure of the proposed maturity model. Specifically, I was struck that while the content of the drill-down discussions was becoming more granular and substantive (and thus more valuable), the connections among topics were not being clarified to an equal degree. Indeed, a noticeable amount of repetition and overlap seemed to be developing during drill-down discussions, making it difficult at times to see where particular threads of discussion “fit” into the overall conversation.

In my line of work (as a risk taxonomist) this kind of overlap usually signifies a need to look at the high-level category structure. To some, “uber classifications” of this type are a bit of window dressing, useful for reports yet contributing little of substantive value.

I have always disagreed with this view. Specifically it seems to me that top-level categories are like high-level winds in the Caribbean during late summer when tropical depressions are meandering about. These winds are important in determining the course of the future storm systems brewing below, influencing their direction and (in many cases) creating interference patterns that can prevent the storm from taking shape at all. (This is not that I consider our community discussions to be an incipient hurricane; no analogy is perfect!)

We might want to take a look at the metadata maturity model from a similar perspective, to see how well our high-level categories are driving the project. I am separately posting a PowerPoint that outlines some specific ideas along these lines.

One reason for posting a blog on this point (versus merely posting) is to explain why I think it is important to interrupt the ongoing community discussion process for a side-bar conversation.

In short, it seemed important to acknowledge that I’ve seen this kind of intervention happen before, and not always to good effect. In taxonomic consulting engagements, I dread the moment in a project when—after achieving some degree of progress and consensus—some well-meaning workgroup participant suggests that a better general method is available to address the problem, and that we would do far better to restart the discussion using some alternate approach.

I cringe at such moments because re-opening a discussion of high-level architecture in project taxonomy—while often worthwhile (and sometimes project-saving)—do place additional demands on the team, which can jeopardize all of the accomplishments and momentum a group has struggled to achieve so far. Hence, a significant “hurdle cost” must be associated with any such suggestions.

Nonetheless, I think the balance here is in favor of an additional conversation. I guess I’ll learn shortly whether or not all of you others agree. I’ll look forward to additional thoughts and reactions.