Organisational versus Network Secrecy – Limits to the Wikileaks Model

I attended two fascinating public lectures yesterday, one on America's international relations in the lead-up to 9/11 and the other on animal welfare law, the second of which was delivered by a particularly powerful presenter. I'm no animal lover, but the principle that people can use ill-formed laws to argue that they're acting acceptably (equating acting legally with acting acceptably) when what the laws allow is really intolerable was intriguing.

Neither of these areas are that familiar to me, but there were a few messages from the first that I can't help reflect on. The session was also serving as a book launch, for “Strategic Shortfall – The Somalia Syndrome and the March to 9/11,” and the author's main thesis (as far as I understood it) was that the event was not nearly as much of a turning point as was publicised and that a number of individuals within the US government and intelligence communities were particularly concerned about a growing threat from Al-Qaeda for years (particularly since the US's pull out of Somalia in 1993) leading up to it (including former president Bill Clinton), but that entrenched skepticism that a non-state actor could possibly be a threat to the United States prevented many in the Bush administration from taking it as seriously as they should have. Their unwillingness to recognise the interconnected nature of the world we live in, and how it could facilitate the kind of coordination for such an attack in such an informal way.

After all the recent attention to Julian Assange and Wikileaks, I can't help but wonder how this all relates. I strongly believe in the power of systems like Wikileaks to shape the world in a positive way, but given the power of more informal clusters to coordinate events, we can't ignore its limitations either.

Because whereas organisations have to expend large amounts of effort (and thus capital) to conceal the information that they do, secrecy is a built-in part of the networks that these smaller groups use to direct their actions. Systems like Wikileaks have the power to unearth the artificial secrecy of large corporations and governments, but how can they hope to keep track of these highly-motivated but distributed agents using these networks that can leave so few traces?

I think a useful way to look at information is on two axes – transparency, and accessibility.

	Transparent	Opaque
Accessible	This is the main kind of information published by sources like Wikileaks. Once you have it it's easy to broadcast to the world.	The example that comes to mind here is the Enron case, where there was an enormous amount of revealing financial data publicly available, but you need Ph.D.'s to decipher it for the rest of us.
Inaccessible	Knowledge communicated by motivated but distributed agents, taking advantage of networks for the secrecy they can provide. This would be easily interpreted by people, if only it was available to them. Wikileaks powerless here.	By its very nature, no examples assert themselves, but this is the most potentially threatening kind of information. It really speaks to the importance of not locking up the ability to interpret kinds of information in a single institution.

Of course, these axes are over a continuous spectrum; I've specified the endpoints. The problem along the accessibility dimension is lack of whistleblowers; along transparency, it's interpreters. The Wikileaks model will always require journalistic volunteers, perhaps to procure, but mostly to interpret information. Here the main difficulty will be finding volunteers that have the skill to make important information – which may depend on a large amount of training or extensive knowledge to understand – accessible to a broader audience. The more opaque the information is, the more difficult it is to find interpreters.

It's worth elaborating that 'opaque' need not mean 'digitally encrypted,' as the Enron case demonstrates. I use it to mean 'requiring knowledge or expertise not common among all those who would share interest in the information were they able to make sense of it.'

Things like personal medical records are things we would like to only be accessible to ourselves and our doctors when needed, and (unless you understand medicine) typically require their expertise to distill for us.

While I recognise the disparity between perceived and actual likelihood of terror events due to the popular media, we can't deny that it's only getting easier for the embittered few to ruin everything for the rest of us.