Chapter 9: WikiLeaks: Can we make power transparent?

9.1 WikiLeaks and power

WikiLeaks was founded by Julian Assange in the year 2006. It is a non-profit and non-commercial Internet platform that is funded by online donations. The purpose of WikiLeaks is that it is intended to make information about organizations that abuse power available to the public. Such documents can be uploaded anonymously by using an online submission form. WikiLeaks tries to make power transparent by leaking secret documents about political and economic power. 

In April 2010, WikiLeaks published a video that shows how the US air force kills civilians and journalists in Iraq. But this was not the only top-secret document that WikiLeaks published to the world. In fact, more than 90 000 top-secret documents have been visible to the public. This circumstance, that WikiLeaks has become a subject of world politics, has led to the discussion of the political power of the Internet and social media.

Michael Foucault’s theory about Surveillance implies that surveillance is a form of disciplinary power. Surveillance is knowledge about whether individuals behave as they should, in accordance with the rules or not. WikiLeaks’s goal is to make public knowledge about institutions in order to monitor them to see whether they behave in accordance with certain normative rules, for example to discover conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and oppression. Today Internet shapes the lives of many humans. It has become the new key to information, communication and co-production. Internet can be aid to be a “panoptic eye of power” and it allows the power to be reverse to those who are normally not the object of surveillance, for example WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is a way to give powers to those who usually don’t have power otherwise

9.2 WikiLeaks, Liberalism and Socialism

Liberalism has freedom as basic value and individualism as view of society. The economy is seen as a private property and the source of wealth is the capital. Private affairs are not controlled by the state and the culture is characterized by plurality of interests and worldviews. The political struggle is against regulating state. In contrast to Liberalism, Socialism emphasizes has equality as a basic value and sociality and solidarity as a view of society. The economy is seen as a collective ownership and the source of wealth is the “co-operation of creative human beings freed from exploitation”. The state and politics in Socialism is categorized by grassroots democracy and the culture is controlled by universal rights and interests. The political struggle is against capital interests, exploitation, capitalist state and ideology. WikiLeaks has a liberal ideology, because it sees big government as the main problem, which reflects the liberal tendency to never trust governments. It also has a strong focus on freedom and the value of information plurality with a focus on “good governance”, which means that open governments answers injustice rather than causing it and they expose and undo corruption.

9.3 WikiLeaks, Journalism and Alterative Media

A journalist is a paid person, who creates information of recent or current events of interests to the public. But journalism can also be any kind of information at the hands of professionals or amateurs, of journalists or citizens and of users or producers in a peer production. The most basic definition of journalism is “finding things out, then telling people about them via newspapers, radio, television or the Internet”. The problem with journalism is that it often, in many countries, gets censored by the government like in the case with WikiLeaks. But WikiLeaks is an alternative medium that makes use of Internet document leaking to try to make them available to the public. The worldviews of WikiLeaks give more weight to politics than to political economy and ideology critique. In order for WikiLeaks to become a critical, socialist watchdog medium it needs to acknowledge socialistic theories and practices and the radical critique of capitalism. So the answer to the question is yes, but it needs to undergo some changes in order for it to work properly. WikiLeaks is a first step of doing so. 

Amanda Lindkvist