This is the unedited ver­sion of a piece pub­lished on The Lowy Insti­tute for Inter­na­tional Policy’s Lowy Inter­preter blog.

“Con­cepts that have proven use­ful in order­ing things eas­ily achieve such author­ity over us that we for­get their earthly ori­gins and accept them as unal­ter­able givens… it is by no means an idle game if we become prac­ticed in analysing long-​​held com­mon­place con­cepts and show­ing the cir­cum­stances on which their jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and use­ful­ness depend, and how they have grown up, indi­vid­u­ally, out of the givens of expe­ri­ence. Thus their exces­sive author­ity will be broken.” — Albert Einstein

Yesterday’s piece by Rory Med­calf at Lowy Inter­preter took a look at what he saw as con­se­quences of the Wik­iLeaks expo­sure of US diplo­matic traf­fic. His views are inter­est­ing and they rep­re­sent a cer­tain view­point, but their valid­ity seems to rely on a par­tic­u­lar assump­tion; that we choose to let the way we’ve always done things remain the way we do them into the future.

There is, after all, an alter­na­tive. We can adopt a new world­view where we allow acts such as Cable­gate become the cat­a­lyst for change and we renew diplo­macy, change jour­nal­ism and open up gov­ern­ment. After all, last week saw the first anniver­sary of the Obama administration’s Open Gov­ern­ment Direc­tive and our own Prime Min­is­ter made sim­i­lar state­ments about open­ness of her admin­is­tra­tion after this year’s Fed­eral elec­tion, fol­low­ing on from the Dec­la­ra­tion of Open Gov­ern­ment ear­lier in the year. Let’s walk the talk.

So, to look at a num­ber of Rory’s conclusions.

Bad for diplo­macy and inter­na­tional coop­er­a­tion: What if state­craft was changed? What if pub­lic diplo­macy became the norm? Cer­tainly, behind closed doors con­ver­sa­tions need to take place at times in order for diplo­macy to be effec­tive. But what if this expo­sure of the inner work­ings of inter­na­tional diplo­macy was an oppor­tu­nity to remake state­craft where decep­tion and mis­di­rec­tion were anathema?

Bad for cohe­sion in the demo­c­ra­tic world: Rory con­flates the ille­gal and, frankly, idi­otic actions of a few script kid­dies with the more sen­si­ble sup­port­ers of the kind of open­ness Wik­iLeaks and Julian Assange argue for. The First Cyber War as some have declared it is prob­lem­atic, but it will go away as the juve­niles become bored. I strug­gle to see how Rory’s dec­la­ra­tion about cohe­sion and the argu­ment he makes are related.

Bad for free­dom of infor­ma­tion: A real issue. There is a cul­ture of over-​​classification amongst many West­ern gov­ern­ments, includ­ing our own. Yet, the whole­sale changes wrought on our FoI sys­tem, the intro­duc­tion of the Infor­ma­tion Com­mis­sioner and the pow­er­ful push for open licens­ing of pub­lic sec­tor infor­ma­tion will make unnec­es­sary clas­si­fi­ca­tion pro­gres­sively more dif­fi­cult. No doubt, there will be abuses, but if those seek­ing infor­ma­tion and those admin­is­ter­ing it play fair, we will end up in a mea­sur­ably bet­ter posi­tion than we were before. With more a more open view of the way gov­ern­ment works, cit­i­zen sat­is­fac­tion with how informed they are could act as a deter­rent to unwanted infor­ma­tion exposures.

Bad for peace­mak­ers: Cur­rent West­ern prac­tice in peace­keep­ing and peace­build­ing oper­a­tions, which has largely con­sisted of drop­ping in pre-​​packaged demo­c­ra­tic mod­els tied up with a bow has been a dis­as­ter. More than one inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised author­ity includ­ing peo­ple such as David Kil­cullen and the Folke Bernadotte Acad­emy in Swe­den are pro­gres­sively more crit­i­cal of this approach, pre­fer­ring activ­ity that more closely aligns with direct local pop­u­la­tion needs and rebuilds extant mod­els of gov­er­nance in local­ity through more open col­lab­o­ra­tions. This is a major change in out­look, and one which is yet to see broad adop­tion, but is real­is­ing real suc­cesses. Open peace­build­ing can and does work, though there’s no ques­tion that it’s dif­fi­cult and still requires a level of confidentiality.

Bad for jour­nal­ism: Absolutely not. The main­stream media, with a few notable excep­tions, enjoys its prox­im­ity to power and is often over­whelmed by it. In a world where a new jour­nal­ism exists — one where truth can be told and sep­a­rated from the ugly sym­bio­sis between pol­i­tics and jour­nal­ism — we will be in a far bet­ter place; one where the Fourth Estate reasserts its place as a lim­it­ing fac­tor on disin­gen­u­ous­ness and decep­tion by oth­er­wise demo­c­ra­tic governments.

More than this, we may finally see the end of the inter­minable argu­ments over just what con­sti­tutes a jour­nal­ist and jour­nal­ism in our hyper­con­nected world. Per­haps the old media guard will realise they are sim­ply a part of the pic­ture and that fine jour­nal­ism is being done by peo­ple with sub­ject exper­tise every­where, but whose work sees them out­side the tra­di­tional media environment.

Bad for Obama: Short term pain, I think. Yes, the admin­is­tra­tion is far more inter­na­tion­al­ist than recent oth­ers, and yes, they have a black eye over this. But why? More than any­thing it’s because the man who preached “Change” and “Yes we can” has largely proven to be more or less more of the same. The cable leaks are more oppor­tu­nity than cost; an oppor­tu­nity to shake up Wash­ing­ton as promised and remake US politics.

Bad for the Gillard gov­ern­ment: Cer­tainly for the PM, who is yet to with­draw her fool­ish dec­la­ra­tion of ille­gal­ity against Assange and Wik­ileaks. With a grow­ing num­ber of voices in Aus­tralian pol­i­tics and soci­ety lin­ing up to sup­port the rule of law in Mr Assange’s case, there is hope that he will get fair treat­ment in any court that chooses to charge him with respect to these leaks — notably some­thing that is yet to hap­pen in spite of spec­u­la­tion that a Grand Jury has been empan­elled in Vir­ginia to do just such a thing.

Like Rory, my thoughts are spec­u­la­tive. I hope he is wrong and I am right. I hope that the mat­ters Wik­iLeaks has brought to light in 2010 are a cat­a­lyst for change and not a trig­ger for a lockdown.

“When the doc­trine of alle­giance to party can utterly up-​​end a man’s moral con­sti­tu­tion and make a tem­po­rary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preach­ing it, teach­ing it, extend­ing it, per­pet­u­at­ing it? Shall you say, the best good of the coun­try demands alle­giance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his con­science into the gut­ter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?” - Mark Twain