There was a controversial diary up yesterday: Taliban Vows Revenge on Those Named by Wikileaks. It's long since scrolled off, but I want to reopen the topic because I think there is more information than the diarist reported, and because this story goes raises serious questions about our responsibilities in the internet age.
My basic points:
- The US military was careless in not sanitizing the documents to remove informants' names.
- US carelessness does not excuse Wikileaks in any case from its own responsibilities, and attempts by Julian Assange to shift the blame are not credible.
- Names and other identifying marks were released in the Wikileaks dump.
First: This is not a diary about the Afghan war, not about whether or not to support the war, not about whether there was or is any reason to continue the war. It is not even a diary about the ethics of releasing the overall information in the documents.
This diary, and I hope the comments, will focus on the ethical aspects of including the names of Afghan informants in the document release.
So:
1. The US military was careless in not sanitizing the documents to remove informants' names.
This appears to be a case (common in all bureaucracies) of conflicting procedures, combined with an insufficient appreciation for the way information can be disseminated in the internet age.
By that, I mean that, while the US gov't has strict procedures in place for sanitizing names and other identifiers of its informants, these procedures are often relaxed, overlooked or ignored in battlefield conditions. This probably stems from a recognition that if a villager comes up to a soldier in the middle of a firefight and says there are enemy combatants hiding in his house, that soldier's report is probably not going to go through the same scrutiny and sanitizing as, say, a CIA report of how they developed and maintained an informant in the Ministry of Information.
Asked why the WikiLeaks documents were not sanitized, a defense official, who asked not to be named, said this kind of tactical or battlefield intelligence gathered at the local level is not necessarily subjected to sanitizing as is done in more formal intelligence gathering.
A Pentagon spokesman says Secretary Gates has acknowledged the danger regarding source disclosure and the need to look at security procedures for forces deployed in Afghanistan, but that he also he wants to push as much information as possible as far forward as possible to the troops in the field.
Former CIA director Hayden emphasizes that the Pentagon's rules may be different than those of the CIA. But he adds that it is tough to balance the security of intelligence sources' identities with the need for analysts to know them in order to properly assess the information they provide. VOANews
I suspect that the military will be re-examining their procedures now. But, in addition, there is the broader issue of access to the documents, which were supposedly secure. We're still learning how that security was breached, but I'll point out that any security is only as good as the people maintaining it. From what I've heard so far, it seems someone without authorization talked his way into a secure facility and copied the documents. I have some technical reasons to find the story suspicious, but it still points out the vulnerability of data in the age of computers, which specialize in ultra-fast data transfers and and infinite number of copies.
2. US carelessness does not excuse Wikileaks in any case from its own responsibilities, and attempts by Julian Assange to shift the blame are not credible.
[Julian] Assange and WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website that publishes leaked documents from around the world, have come under increasing fire amid accusations that publishing the files put people's lives at risk. But in an interview with the Observer, Assange said the blame for any deaths lay squarely with US military authorities.
"We are appalled that the US military was so lackadaisical with its Afghan sources. Just appalled. We are a source protection organisation that specialises in protecting sources and have a perfect record from our activities," he said. UK Guardian 1 Aug
The fallacy of this argument can be shown by a simple example: If a pretty girl dresses up in a miniskirt, that does not permit a boy to rape her.
Another example: If you are careless with your wallet and drop it on the street, your carelessness does not give me license to pick up that wallet and sell your identity on the internet.
One of the major ethical problems that the computer poses is the distance it creates between cause and effect. The attacker never sees his victim, often times never knows who his victim is, may not even be sure there is a victim, because he sits at his computer in his home or office and the effects of his computer acts are felt half a world away. In the past, proximity and knowledge could, on occasion, be counted on to stir the conscience and perhaps dissuade someone from attack; that restraint no longer exists. There is also no physical difference in the actions taken to steal one's identity from the act of, say, posting on this forum; they are all nothing more than keyboard strikes and mouse movements.
An related ethical issue is the ability of the computer to magnify our acts. A thief can only steal one wallet at a time, but he can steal thousands or millions of identities in one action.
All of this is to point out that the computer has changed the nature of how ethics views our actions, but our habits and our thought processes have not yet caught up. (This is, unfortunately, an accurate summary of the history of man's interactions with his technology.) The computer requires that we have an even higher awareness of our actions and their consquences.
Back to Assange. Because of his computer power, because of his position in the internet world, he has taken on a higher responsibility than, say the average blogger (not that we're off the hook, either). More to the point, he claims to be aware of this. Here's a portion of his argument that I quoted above:
We are a source protection organisation that specialises in protecting sources and have a perfect record from our activities.
Assange claims he offered to let the Obama administration clean up the documents:
Now, some names may have crept into others and may be unfortunate, may not be. But you must understand that we contacted the White House about that issue and asked for their assistance in vetting to see whether there would be any exposure of innocents and to identify those names accordingly. Democracy Now Rush Transcript of Amy Goodman interview with Assange
Although Assange claims that Eric Schmidt backed him up on this, I can't find any record of it. In any case, as I argued in a comment in the earlier diary, I do not find this credible, for these reasons:
- It requires us to believe that a man, and an organization, dedicated to exposing information that governments want kept secret, would make an offer to a government to allow it to remove some of that information.
- It also requires us to believe that this administration, whom we here often accuse of being too security conscious, would suddenly shrug their shoulders and decline to respond when offered a chance, not just to get an advance peek at what was about to released, but also to prevent some of it from being released.
- Finally, what would be the logistics here? Picture the scenario of government agents being invited into Wikileaks HQ to sit beside workers who hate their guts, and both groups being told to work with each other to remove some data. Or, in the alternative, picture Wikileaks sending its files to the Pentagon and hoping that they will be kind enough, nice enough, dumb enough to send them back with only some names removed.
Not that it really matters from an ethical viewpoint. To return to my earlier analogy, it would be as though I'd found your wallet and called you up and offered to give you a chance to set up identity theft protection before I published its contents.
It's also noteworthy that Assange has not tried to justify the release of names and other information, but instead tries to blame the army for not being successful in keeping that information from him.
So it's clear that Wikileaks knew of the dangers of exposing informants' names to the world at large, and was either careless or uncaring in releasing them anyway.
Bottom line: Regardless of the ethical arguments to be made for or against US Afghan policy, or about releasing the documents in some form in order to provide ammunition for those arguments, Wikileaks had a positive ethical duty to prevent specific details that could endanger people's lives from falling into the hands of those who would willingly and eagerly kill them. And they failed to do so.
3. Names and other identifying marks were released in the Wikileaks dump.
While this is a developing story and (as of this moment) I haven't seen any reports of Taliban executions, we do know that some names of some informants did get into the internet (I got some of these links from comments posted in the earlier diary):
A search by The New York Times through a sampling of the documents released by the organization WikiLeaks found reports that gave the names or other identifying features of dozens of Afghan informants, potential defectors and others who were cooperating with American and NATO troops. NY Times 28 July
Hundreds of Afghan civilians who worked as informants for the U.S. military have been put at risk by WikiLeaks' publication of more than 90,000 classified intelligence reports which name and in many cases locate the individuals, The [UK] Times newspaper reported Wednesday.
The article says, in spite of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's claim that sensitive information had been removed from the leaked documents, that reporters scanning the reports for just a couple hours found hundreds of Afghan names mentioned as aiding the U.S.-led war effort.
One specific example cited by the paper is a report on an interview conducted by military officers of a potential Taliban defector. The militant is named, along with his father and the village in which they live. CBS News (The Times article cited is behind a firewall.)
Steve Coll, an expert on the region and a former senior editor of The Washington Post, said in a New Yorker podcast on Thursday, "my reading of the disclosure of these informants in the context of Taliban-menaced southern Afghanistan is that people named in those documents have a reasonable belief that they are going to get killed, or — actually the way it works with the Taliban is, if they can’t find you, they’ll take your brother instead." ...
In the New Yorker podcast, Mr. Coll also suggested that WikiLeaks apparently made documents naming Afghan informants available online without proper consideration. The Lede 30 July
This report from Britain's TV Channel 4 also shows some actual documents from the Wikileaks release and explains how they can be used to locate and kill informants and their families - something a Taliban spokesman told Channel 4 they intend to do:
"We are studying the report," he said, confirming that the insurgent group already has access to the 92,000 intelligence documents and field reports.
"We knew about the spies and people who collaborate with US forces. We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the US. If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them." Channel 4
I said early on that we suffer from a basic ethical dilemma: Our technology increases our capacity for harm at a far faster rate than our ability to comprehend our capacity for harm can keep up with it. What modern computer technology has done is to democratize, even to individualize, the power to harm that was once the near-exclusive provenance of government. Government, for all its faults and flaws, is subject to scrutiny for its actions - just look at any day's list of the diaries on this site. If Wikileaks and Assange are going to take on themselves the prerogatives of government, they are equally required to take on the responsibilities and the scrutiny as well.