Reports from the United States:WikiLeaks, Power and Journalists

On the issue of the more than 92,000 secret documents leaked onto the website WikiLeaks, a majority of the analyses have focused on considering what their influence will be on the future of the war in Afghanistan and on the relations between Washington and Islamabad, taking into account the U.S. denouncing the Pakistani authorities by accusing them of playing a double game.

In my opinion, in both areas, the effects will be minimal. Certainly, the infiltration has given further ammunition to those advocating for the total or partial withdrawal of the troops by 2011, but that scenario seemed inevitable even before the WikiLeaks infiltration, unless Obama can show us a stubbornness that defies the laws of the politically expedient. With regard to relations with Pakistan, the administration has long since known about the ISI’s [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] double game, and keeps complaining to Islamabad.

The leak itself, however, may have a greater impact for the future as the launch (or rather, a consolidation) of a new political actor: a global civil society with the desire to control governments. WikiLeaks is the embodiment of something that was announced when the Internet was born, but had not really crystallized, at least in relation to governments. Thanks to the information society and the ability to work in networks, it will make it harder for public authorities to seal their actions within a black box labeled “top secret.”

So, not surprisingly, the Obama administration reacted with indignation, and promised to pursue the infiltrators. Nobody likes to lose power, especially the government of the world’s only superpower. As with the emergence of a so-called “citizen journalism,” some have warned that the advent of WikiLeaks and other similar groups could possibly lead us to a society of disinformation. The danger would be the loss of influence of the traditional media, whose task it is to analyze and contrast information, in favor of “citizen platforms” that are less rigorous.

WikiLeaks does not seem to want to substitute traditional media, however, but rather complement it, aware that their roles are different. It is for this reason that three weeks before the documents were posted on the Internet it had given access to three prestigious newspapers of major global democratic power: The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel. And they were given the task of transmitting and analyzing for the general public a volume of documents that virtually no citizen has the time nor desire to read.

If we were to take into account any long term partnership between the new civilian “watchdogs” and the traditional media, the new era that the infiltration opens up must be received by the public as good news. And it will be much more difficult for powers that be to control a globalized civil society rather than one that could be conditioned at a national level simply by cutting it off from access to information.