PRESENT TENSE:AS LORD NORTHCLIFFE once famously put it: "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising." By that definition, the world's most successful news organisation is currently the online whistleblowing website, Wikileaks, which last Monday orchestrated the release of a vast trove of classified material documenting the day-to-day operations of the war in Afghanistan.
Published in concert with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, the 92,000 documents reveal the daily reality of a futile war, detailing everything from regular civilian deaths to pervasive corruption.
The Afghan war logs are a kind of information mosaic, together giving a picture of the war that is at considerable odds with the official version of events coming from the Nato-led forces there. In any wartime scenario, we expect governments to be secretive as a matter of policy, but what these documents suggest is that in Afghanistan, the secrecy serves to obscure the real goal rather than to further it. There’s a fog of war, and everybody seems lost in it.
The importance of the war logs, however, is not only that they provide us with an unvarnished depiction of events, but also that they undermine the endemic secrecy governments have become accustomed to. Judging from its first decade, this century could well see western nations, and the US in particular, in a state of perpetual war, an Orwellian prospect made possible only by vast levels of government secrecy.
In a democracy, a major obstacle to continuous warmongering is public opinion, which can be more easily manipulated if the public is deprived of all the facts. By encouraging and facilitating conscientious whistleblowing, Wikileaks is attacking this anti-democratic abuse of secrecy – and, predictably, governments are fighting back.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is reluctant to enter the US for fear of arrest, while Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, pointed out last week that Obama “has indicted more people now for leaks than all previous presidents put together . . . So this is an administration that’s more concerned about preventing transparency”.
But there is an interesting parallel at work here: while governments are struggling to adjust to the ways the internet is compromising their secrecy, individuals are struggling to adjust to how the internet is compromising their privacy. Every Facebook uproar and every Foursquare stalking scare story forces us to confront how diminished our sense of privacy has become in an era of ubiquitous social networking. And what is individual privacy other than a set of secrets we keep from others, the discrete facets of our personality that we either reveal to or conceal from family, friends and colleagues.
Controlling this process is fundamental to our sense of privacy, and that is why people react so vociferously when, say, Facebook changes its settings without consultation – our control is being compromised without our consent. We are hastily having to adjust to changed expectations of privacy, and in the process are re-setting our standards of personal secrecy.
How is this different from governments’ reliance on secrecy? Part of us, perhaps begrudgingly, understands that a government also has various facets to its identity, and that it chooses to hide or display those facets in various contexts. We hope that secrets are kept for the public benefit, but we’ve become almost inured to discovering the opposite is true. In an Irish context, I found the revelation that Nama wouldn’t be subject to freedom of information requests depressingly inevitable, but less depressingly inevitable than the lack of public outrage about it.
Earlier this month, the Washington Postran a three-part exposé on what it called "Top Secret America", the unimaginably vast and inefficient US security apparatus which operates beyond the public eye and which is essentially unaccountable and ungovernable. The response to the series was little more than a collective resigned shrug.
The scope for government secrecy to conceal wrongdoing is far greater than for an individual – there are many more victims of government-sanctioned war than there are victims of serial killers, say. It need hardly be said that there is no equivalence between the indiscriminate murder of civilians revealed in the war logs with a drunken indiscretion revealed on Facebook.
But we are living through an information revolution, and both the state and the individual are being affected in surprisingly similar ways: the secrecy relied on by one is being frayed just as the privacy required by the other is being transformed.
As Lord Northcliffe well knew, there will always be somebody somewhere wanting to suppress information. How the information will be revealed, and how the somebodies will try to suppress it, is what is changing so dramatically.