We all appreciate that ‘knowledge is power’, as an apprentice I asked a skilled craftsman to explain the nuances of his trade. He replied ‘If I tell you that, you’ll know as much as me’. Knowledge implies power, sharing that knowledge imparts power to the learner and diminishes that of the holder. Therefore by definition it levels a society.
So the debate over WikiLeaks divides us into those who support the sanctity of knowledge as a means to wield power and control over others and those that believe society is better served by open sharing. On a recent BBC Radio 4 phone-in a caller cited the damage WikiLeaks might have caused our invasion of Normandy in 1944. On face value it seems a valid argument but is easily negated; the same freedom of information might have allowed us to understand Hitler’s true intentions in 1939 and avoided war in the first place.
At the same time it is important to recognise that our capacity to keep secrets is diminishing. We are now able to store, capture and move information so easily it has become increasingly difficult to keep electronic information secret. A pair of glasses might conceal a camera, a wallet might hold a listening device and the Bible can be stored on a few millimetres of silicon. Fearing this causes terrorists to avoid electronic means of communication and organise through face to face meetings. So freedom of information could be seen to limit the terrorists aspirations.
But the real strength of WikiLeaks emerges once it also exposes information from terrorist organisations as well as from traditional security services. Once a disenfranchised Taliban operative uses WikiLeaks to expose threats to our security we should see the bi-directional benefit of freedom of information. This is more than a liberalist viewpoint, it demands vision and an awareness of the effect of the internet and technology’s on society in order to see that ultimately we all benefit from openness.
In its earliest days the internet promised to open up riches of information to us all. Sadly we have begun to see distinct limitations on that. The global success of Google at channelling a majority of searches through their own servers limits the information we access. Google thereby creates their version of knowledge is commercial power. What pops to the top of the search list is not necessarily what we seek but generally that which someone has paid for us to see; hardly surprising when this principle underlies Google commercial model. Who bothers clicking to the fifteenth page of a search? As relevance is principally based on shopping then he who pays the piper calls the tune.
But there is already an alternative to this big server model. It is P2P or peer to peer, the principle behind Napster and all torrent based file sharing of music, films and software, an alternative the establishment vilifies. It needs no central servers, instead linking together hundreds, sometimes thousands and ultimately all computers that may have the information we want. Google launched a version of this called Google Wave some time back but killed it off pretty fast. Then again who would willingly introduce a technology that destroys your own commercial model?
Google was cool and relevant in the days when just accessing information was a challenge, but with far faster internet speeds this approach begins to seem redundant. If I am able to link peer to peer to millions of others in the world then typing in a specific enquiry such as ‘what oil paints did Francis Bacon use?’ may connect me to many similarly minded individuals who have asked exactly the same question. They may be on different continents and from other cultures but linked by a common interest. New social links can be built to those whose interests and inquisition matches ours. We tune our own search engine so that the more specific our question the more accurately we can identify those with interests of similar esotery. It may take a structural change to the way the internet works to unleash the benefits of openness, something those with the greatest military and commercial interests will seek to fight assiduously.
We have already begun to see the effects of increased openness. With modern technology a riot in Tehran can be captured and shared globally such that that regime’s capacity to suppress its population by rigid central control is dented. I maintain we should accept that freedom of information, if combined with ease of dissemination has the capacity to make our society safer. If covert operations became impossible to plan without leaks then it forces a society to act through consent.
This is not to suggest openness is a panacea for global troubles, we must still be willing to sanction unilateral action against any regime that steps out of line. But the openness of information is becoming unavoidable so we can either choose to resist it or seek to make the advantages work for us. That is why I support WikiLeaks.
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