I’ve been torn about Wikileaks, the group facilitating the distribution of leaked classified documents on Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently the U.S. diplomatic corps. The transparency those document dumps afford has been radical insofar as it so radically exposes the fallibility of the people waging war—there are few surprises for anyone who pays attention to war, military history, diplomacy, etc. but the shock comes instead from people’s ability to make hubristic mistakes over and over and over again.
The leaks have been analogized to the Pentagon Papers. They’re not, except in the sense that both the Papers and these recent leaks transform governments and armies from machines into people…flawed, short-sighted, weak, greedy, impressionable, naive people, human beings like everyone else except in the amount of power entrusted to them.
But now we hear that the next Wikileaks document dump will be corporate documents from banks, pharmaceutical firms, and energy companies. Whereas the government documents split the public into two emotional camps–defenders of the imperative to have transparency and defenders of the imperative to have secrets–individual corporations have few constituent defenders during a scandal besides their own employees. Who will publicly defend a bank whose internal emails show its board of directors bragged of fleecing mortagees? Who will defend a pharma firm for fudging research on an ineffective but billion-dollar pill? Who will defend an energy company that didn’t report polluting a playground?
The upshot will be that Wikileaks will soon be viewed, by and large, as a legitimate outlet. Far more than it is now. Argue whether or not it was moral to distribute classified government documents, but Wikileaks is doing something p.r.-savvy by shifting at this stage to corporations.