Insidious attack on free speech!

Time, once again, for another submission sent to your humble author from one of our dear readers!

Peter Gordon December 11, 2010

Lawyers are used to seeing all manner of calumny disclosed in documents produced under compulsion to the court. Because of restrictive rules, most never see the light of day, whatever the legitimate public interest. Likewise in the parliamentary arena.

It's time to challenge this war on information, and call it what it is - a growing and insidious attack on free speech.

We should re-examine the way the law treats claims to privilege and confidentiality and the way governments can suppress information. It's become too hard and too expensive to access and legitimately use information in this country. Governments and their public services play freedom-of-information laws like a board game.

It's time for the law to recognise that even if there is a notional character of privilege or confidentiality to information, that should not be an end to the question. Some information might well have some such quality but nevertheless be fully justifiable for public disclosure.

Likewise, it's time to fashion a legal mechanism for independent review of claims to ''national security secrecy''. It's time to have a truly independent arbiter decide whether documents have a national security element, and not just a political embarrassment component; and if they do have a security element, whether it outweighs the public interest in its disclosure.

If the WikiLeaks disclosures tell us anything, it is that no political leader, whatever their colour, is going to hesitate for a nanosecond to conflate the notion of ''national security'' with ''my own career security''. It's time to provide genuine protection for people who take the bold step of coming forward with important information. It's time to make the process cheaper and speedier.

But more important than any of these, when this information may compromise governments and the biggest corporations, it's time to recognise we need a system that protects the process of disclosure from abusive litigious attack and from the pressure of professional public vilification. Because for every Julian Assange who attracts worldwide demonstrations of support, there are a thousand people whose important information got beaten into oblivion by big companies or big governments using various versions of the tactics on display in the past two weeks.

The sight of the most prominent politicians in the world inciting either the prosecution, incarceration or assassination of Assange, or the persecution of his family, is a form of barbarism that demeans us all. Moreover, the phenomenon of companies as big as MasterCard and Visa being gangpressed into anti-trust violations of their commercial relations with WikiLeaks is truly frightening.

WikiLeaks is the most obvious example of the broader war being waged by the most powerful interests in society on access to important information generally.

We are continuously softened up to the notion that it is proper for information to be denied us because it is confidential, ''commercial in confidence'', compromises national security, is subject to parliamentary or legal privilege, or should be kept quiet for diplomatic reasons.

Too often these are vacuous claims.

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If Julian Assange were a Chinese citizen, publishing Chinese government documents, the US would likely be cheering him on.........., this from our 'Comments' section;

Lately I have a strong feeling that the Chinese must be rejoicing at all the "retroactive law invention" that is going on in the West to put one man in jail. Because if Assange had been a Chinese citizen promoting transparency in China we would be lining up to give him the Nobel Prize. We can't demand transparency from others and censorship for ourselves.

In fact, as Evgeny Morozov notes, Russia's Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin is already using the US's reaction to Wikileaks to say what a joke "freedom of the press" is in America. That tweet is in Russian, but the Google translation is: In my opinion, the fate of Assange says the lack of media freedom in the West, the presence of political persecution and human rights violations.

What's really stunning, beyond just the sheer uselessness and impotence of the US government's response to Wikileaks, is the fact that it's inevitably destroying any moral high ground on claims of freedom and support of free speech we might have once had.
 
In the end, I would expect that to have a much bigger impact than anything that's in the actual leaked cables.