Borges, Journalism, Wikileaks

Nick Rowe and I were both thinking about Borges’ Library of Babel the other day, though for different reasons (I think). For Nick it was part of another of his fun posts that start from way beyond leftfield and end up nice and close to home. I was trying to figure out something helpful and original to say about Wikileaks and what it means for journalism. This is where I’m at:

Imagine two libraries. The first library contains every important book that has ever been written. It’s a big library, but not that big.  There is only one problem: it is very hard to get into. Access to the stacks is strictly controlled, and when it comes to the best and most important books, it is almost impossible for civilians to even see them. And so while the public knows where all the useful information is to be found, that doesn’t do them much good since they can’t get at it. It’s basically a useless library, so let’s call this the Library of Robarts.

The second library is much, much bigger than the first. It contains every possible book that could ever be written, from a book that is entirely blank except for a single “A” on the first page, to a book that is nothing but “zzzzzz” on every page. It also contains books of any arbitrary length, since individual volumes can be concatenated to form much longer books. Unlike the first library, this one is open to the public. Anyone can go in and wander the stacks to their hearts content, and is free to spend days, months, or even years in the reading rooms.

But this library, too, is totally useless. It's useless not despite its size, but because of its size. Imagine you are looking for a copy of Moby Dick. You find one that you think is the right one, except it is very hard to know for sure. That is because in addition to the true copy of Moby Dick, the library also contains every possible version of Moby Dick that varies from the true one by a single letter or punctuation mark. And one that varies by only two letters or punctuation marks. Here’s the key point: the only way you could ever know that you had the correct version of Moby Dick is if you already had a true version of Moby Dick! In order to find what you want in this library (called the Library of Babel) is if you already know what you are looking for. As Nick puts it,  "What makes a library useful, indeed what makes a library a library, is not just what it contains, but what it does not contain. The optimal size of a library, even if we ignore the cost of books, librarians, and bricks and mortar, is finite."

From the public’s point of view, the ideal library would be mixture of the two regimes. We want the limited size (only the important books!) of the first library, but the open-access of the second.

So what does this mean for journalism? For most of its existence, journalism has taken place in a Library of Robarts world. Officials have secret information that the public wants. The job of the journalist has been to learn about, and hopefully obtain, information that is being kept secret. The journalist in this case is, literally, the medium through which important secret information becomes useful public information.

In the aftermath of the Wikileaks affair, some have argued that this is a sign that we are moving from a world where useful information is secret, and therefore scarce, to an era where useful information is public, and therefore plentiful. That in fact is Julian Assange’s stated goal: a world of absolute transparency, where there are no official secrets.

At first blush, this seems like the ideal mixed-library regime: All and only important official secrets will be made public. The truth will be out there, governments will be more accountable. And journalists will become obsolete, as we will have evolved, say some commentators, into a “post-journalism” world.

Is this plausible? I’m not sure. After all, the two libraries I talked about above are just examples of two ways of hiding a very important piece of information. You can secret it away in a place where no one can get it – put the papers in a safe, or secure it behind very hard encryption, for example. Or you can hide it in plain sight as it were, by embedding the one useful bit of information in a sea of irrelevant information.

Governments typically adopt the first tactic when trying to keep secrets. They put a classified stamp on it, limit its promulgation, lock it up, encrypt it, and so on. But sometimes, when faced with a pesky access to information request, they go the other way. They release the requested document along with a huge pile of other related documents, hoping to bury the needle of useful information in a big useless haystack. “You want information?” they say. “We’ll give you information!” That is, they switch from the Library of Robarts tactic to the Library of Babel tactic.

A big deal has been made about the sheer size of the Wikileaks document dump, with over 90 000 files made public and another 15 000 or so in the queue. Less frequently, it has been observed that the volume of information is not a feature of the leak, but a bug. In his post on the Wikileak, Jay Rosen wondered if the sheer scale of the revelations would have a counterproductive effect. Here is what he wrote:

We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs. My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

I think he gets the effect right (reaction has been pretty muted) but not the rationale. I don’t think people kinda shrugged at the Afghanistan logs because the scale of the problems they reveal seems intractable. Rather, I think it is because the scale of the information that was revealed is journalistically intractable. Wikileaks didn’t give us the happy medium library, with its combination of useful and public information, it gave us the Library of Babel, where every good story was hidden in a sea of otherwise useless data.

The lesson for Wikileaks is that information is better when it comes not in a torrent but in useful drips. That is something the Telegraph understood last year, when it tormented the British political class with daily Chinese-water torture revelations about MPs spending habits.

The lesson for journalism, I think, is that it doesn’t really matter which library system we’re operating in. Whether it’s all hidden in Robarts, or in plain view in Babel,  the information still needs to be mediated. Except instead of making useful secrets public, the task of the journalist will be to show the public what is needle, and what is haystack. If anything, journalists in the Libary of Babel world will have to be be more knowledgeable, more specialized in the fields they cover, because in order to find the good stories, they'll already have to know what they are looking for.



Wikileaks and the Paradox of Transparency

What is the impact of the War Logs leak? I think this is best split into at least four questions.

1.  What is the impact on journalism?
2. What is the impact on operational security?
3. What will the impact be on public support for the mission?
4. What is the impact on the military?

1.  Following Jeff Jarvis, we can frame this as the question of “what if there is no more secrecy”? Journalists are, more than anything, information brokers, gatekeepers, and editors.  The big career score is “breaking a story” – that is, being the first person to report on something that becomes a cultural touchstone.

But what happens when there are no more secrets? When, for all intents and purposes, everything is made public, when there is no more use for “access journalism”? I make some tentative explorations of this in chapter five of The Authenticity Hoax, where I’m quite skeptical of the positive claims that are made in favour of maximal transparency and openness.  It’s part of a broader debate being played out between publicity-maximalists like Jarvis and privacy advocates like Andrew Keen, and it is one of the relatively few areas where I’m closer to Keen than to Jarvis.

There’s no magic way of figuring out where the line ought to be between transparency and secrecy. In every case you have to ask who benefits from more transparency, and who benefits from secrecy. Jarvis has a good posting on this where he questions his own commitments:

I make the mistake of thinking that we’ll navigate toward openness via rational and critical discussion. But we’ll more likely move the line because of purposeful subversion of the line like Wikileaks’. The line will be move by force.

This is the nub of the problem. Jay Rosen’s post on this is excellent, and his key point is to note that Wikileaks is the first “stateless” news organization. Why does this matter? Partly because it means it is harder for governments to control it, which can be a good thing. But it also means that Wikileaks has less reason to be responsible and accountable. When newspapers and other “state-based” organizations break news, it is because they perceive themselves as serving the broader public good, and they have a natural constituency that keeps them accountable. Where’s the accountability here, with Wikileaks? I don’t see it, and it bothers me.

2. That said, what is the material effect on the release of these documents on operational security in Afghanistan? From what I’ve read in the documents so far, I don’t see much to be too worried about. I suppose one way of getting at it is to ask whether, if you were working over there, how you would feel about this release. Safer? Less safe? The same? I  don’t have the knowledge or the expertise to answer this adequately.

But perhaps this isn’t a good standard to use anyway. If the military had its way, virtually nothing would be released to the public, in the name of “OPSEC”. OPSEC is just the military version of the “national security” line that the government uses to keep information from the public. But OPSEC and National Security can’t be a get-out-of-jail free card, used to trump all requests for access or information. There is a lot in these documents that I think the public has a right to know about, and that the military could very well have chosen to share with the public years ago, on their own terms.

3.  A lot of people who support the mission are very upset about this leak. For example, my friend Brian Platt got “up on his high horse” (as he put it), arguing that unlike a targeted leak designed to unveil a scandal, this document dump is “a senseless leak, an act of pure treason,” whose only purpose was to screw over the military.

That’s no doubt true, and I share Brian’s suspicion of the motivations behind these leaks.  But just because someone has an agenda, it doesn’t mean the documents aren’t genuine, or valuable, or useful. But more to the point, I’m not convinced that this leak will have the knock-on effect of undermining support for the mission.

Most of the opposition to the mission is  fact-free ideological leanings by people who are against the war not because of what is happening on the ground, but simply because the war exists in the first place -- they are opposed to the mission in principle. In which case, new information -- however positive -- is not going to change their minds. At the same time, a lot of the pro-war faction is pretty much immune to bad news of any sort, and will always be willing to double down on the military commitment no matter how poorly things are going.

The real action is in the fuzzy middle; people (like me) who are unsure of what the goals of the mission should be, and how best they might be achieved, and to what extent realism has to be balanced against idealism. These are people for whom facts on the ground matter, and there is nothing in the documents, on balance, that I can see that would lead the fence-sitters to become devoted anti-war lobbyists.

If anything, I think the opposite is true. The picture that emerges from the documents is of a professional military working in an intense and difficult situation, and performing its job as humanely as possibly under the circumstances.  Canadians have had no indication as to the pace and tempo and intensity of the conflict since the insurgency started in 2006, and that is by design. The military brass has acted under the assumption that if we knew what was going on – how much contact there was, how many IEDs were being found, how many friendly fire or civilian casualties there were – that the public would pull its support. I think that does the public and the military a disservice.

It does no one any good if the public is kept in the dark about what the war is really like. If there is material in these documents that will undermine the effort in the mind of a reasonable public, then that is an argument for making them public. A war that relies for its support on keeping important truths from the public is not a legitimate war.

4. Ultimately, I think that the effect of this leak will be counterproductive for all concerned, in the same way that access-to-information laws have been  counterproductive. In Canada, ATI legislation has helped construct what has been called “the neurotic state” – a government and bureaucracy that is paranoid, highly media-averse, and reluctant to put anything of any consequence in writing.

This is probably what will happen with the military. This leak of very sensitive material is going to convince the government bureaucracy and the military brass that they simply can't put any points of dispute or debate down in writing. There will be an increasing trend towards pseudo-transparency – the release of lots of communiqués and reports that say nothing at all. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be points of contention or matters of urgency; it just means there won’t be a record of it anywhere.

For journalists, coming on the heels of the Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal, it means access will be more difficult to come by. Sources will dry up, interviews will be cancelled, strict and useless talking points will be the order of the day.