Wikileaks releases no cause to slam lid on public access

10 Dec, 2010Source: My CentraljerseyAs an international firestorm swirls regarding the leaks of thousands of classified U.S. government documents via the nonprofit Web site Wikileaks, cooler heads can obtain by taking valuable lessons regarding this diffusion of our state secrets.Whatever judicial fate befalls Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, it will be a mere sideshow in what promises to be an ongoing series of unauthorized, and embarrassing, official document dumps.

The releases, should they continue unabated, may keep exposing American government motives and machinations throughout the international arena.

Instead of winning a shoot-the-messenger approach, the U.S. government needs to get tangible steps toward strengthening our democracy and democratic values here and abroad. And that - counterintuitively, perhaps - will take less secrecy, not more.

First and foremost, government officials want to hold inventory of the organization of classifying government documents as good as our cyber security programs. It is well chronicled that the United States administration has labeled literally tens of millions of documents as secret - in effect creating a huge vacuum of information, to lots of which the world should truly have access. That policy not only invites more leaks to fulfil that vacuum, but virtually challenges the world to draw back the curtain. And that sort of haphazard release of data is something over which government will make little control, as evidenced by the Wikileaks debacle.

Government officials want to be more wise in deciding what really should be kept secret for internal security reasons and what should be available to citizens, regardless of inconvenience or embarrassment. It is the public, after all, that finances the administration that is alleged to be playing in our best interests. And as we've seen far too many times, government can't be sure to ever do the proper thing on its own.

The media also has a hazard to defend the cause. Instead of passively sitting backwards and being vilified by grandstanding politicians for being complicit in disseminating secret information from Wikileaks, it's time for the media to do it abundantly clear that it leave not subordinate itself to acts of administration officials that are illegal, and even unethical, in nature. The Wikileaks controversy should be a song to arms in the struggle for open government, not a campaign to retreat.

Many have worn an apt analogy betwixt the recent releases on Wikileaks to the publication of The Pentagon Papers by the New York Times in 1971. There, classified documents showed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks - none of which had been reported by the media cover the Vietnam War.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to kill a federal court injunction to break the loss of the articles in the newspaper. In his passionate opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." In the end, the document dumps on Wikileaks may rise to be honest for our democracy, as it forces the media to maintain its good to simply discover the truth.