WikiLeaks Is a Blow to Open Government

The piece appeared in the second week of WikiLeaks's Cablegate disclosure, which had begun on November 28, 2010 with the coordinated New York Times / Guardian / Spiegel / Le Monde / El País release of the first batch of U.S. State Department cables. By December 8, the State Department's response — including the OMB memorandum prohibiting federal employees from reading the leaked cables on government systems — had crystallised, and the open-government-policy community was actively divided on what the disclosure meant for their work.

The argument the piece advanced — that WikiLeaks would harden government secrecy practices rather than expand transparency — was the position taken by a meaningful subset of the open-government policy community at the time: the Sunlight Foundation, a number of FOIA-reform advocates, and several of the academic researchers working on classification policy. The reasoning was that the political response to WikiLeaks would be the strengthening of classification, expansion of internal access controls, and the chilling of routine inter-agency information sharing — all of which would undermine the broader transparency project.

The trajectory in the years following partly bore this out. The post-Cablegate hardening of network-access controls inside the federal government (the Insider Threat Program, the Manning court-martial, the post-2013 response to the Snowden disclosures) was real and consequential. But the parallel argument — that WikiLeaks helped open government by demonstrating the volume of unjustified classification — also has been borne out, particularly in the post-2014 declassification reforms and in the broader public conversation about over-classification that has continued through every subsequent transparency-policy cycle.