Hey Ben,
Do you have any particular thoughts on today's Wikileaks release of confidential diplomatic cables?
I've thought about writing in depth about this myself, but I feel both underqualified and overscheduled (grading, PhD applications, syllabus writing). I figure with your experience with San Francisco Open Email, you've probably seen most of these issues in real world specific examples, as opposed to my blanket speculation.
What surprises me is that in some ways I'm more bothered by this release than by the war memos release. I feel like releasing wholesale dumps of diplomatic cables discourages future use of these internal tools for discussion of diplomatic strategy and strains international relationships in ways that are unnecessary and unhelpful.
I'm not sure if the California Public Records Act has a provision like this, but FOIA contains exemptions not just for national security and individual privacy but also "deliberative process". You can't get internal agency email discussions or meeting minutes discussing an ongoing topic using a FOIA request: Congress decided that to open up such documents to public release would discourage frank internal discussion in recorded media like email, and that would hurt the actual process of government more than it would help in the sunshine disinfectant way. Similarly, "executive privilege" is asserted by the White House for the sake of protecting and thus promoting "candid" internal exchanges in giving advice to the President. It's easy for secretive, corrupt or simply oversensitive governments to abuse these exceptions of course, but they nonetheless seem reasonable to me. Frankly, I want embassy employees (full disclosure: I once was one) to be able to freely, efficiently and effectively share their on-the-ground wisdom with others in the State Department; I want the US government to be planning negotiating strategies with foreign governments based on their personal readings of other officials; I want the Secretary of State and the President to be aware of the latest rumors, confidential reports, sensitive meetings in various countries around the world.
Perhaps my interest in this area is in the privacy question involved. Not just privacy in the narrow sense of personal individual information being disclosed to the public unexpectedly (though that's an interesting consequence as well), but privacy in the sense that the flows of information, or more specifically the lack of flows of information, can substantially affect various communicative practices that we think are valuable. Did you see any evidence in the police email project that police would be hesitant to use email for important discussions if they knew it would be made public? That investigations would regress into hard-to-search paper records and backroom conversations instead of electronic systems? In the same way that our personal relationships only really work if irrelevant or inappropriate information can be kept out of the way (sometimes a challenge on Facebook), government processes can only continue effectively if not every email and document is released in a paroxysm of radical transparency.
And I wonder even if this doesn't hurt the cause of open government. If WikiLeaks hadn't released all the cables but had just shared some of the most important ones with the New York Times and other news organizations and those organizations hadn't decided to just publish whatever was interesting but use them as starting points for investigative reporting backed up by various other sources and limited in scope, wouldn't the check on government be just as effective while the harm to the diplomatic process was minimized? If the State Department responds to these releases by keeping less information in electronic form, will the New York Times future investigations into particular important topics actually be held back by the lack of records?
Where else should we be reading about this? I think that "Against Transparency" article from Lessig is a pretty great start, but are there other (perhaps more empirical) examples people should be talking about? Are there excerpts or conclusions of your report that we should be talking more about in relation to this?
Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts. Hope all's well in the City, and that you had a pleasant Thanksgiving.
Nick