As regulars may know, there is no hard editorial line in these parts about certain views, such as intellectual property rights (steady on, old chap, Ed). Take the case of the “whistleblower” site Wikileaks. Samizdata’s founder, Perry de Havilland, has come round to taking the view that whatever collateral damage might be caused by Wikileaks, that the benefits outweigh the bad. I am less sanguine than that; I fear that the activities of Wikileaks may make governments become even more secretive. I admit that much of this stems around attempts forecast the unknowable. For all I know, Perry may be proven right and my reservations are unfounded.
But as they say about making omelettes and breaking eggs, a lot of eggs can be broken on the way to culinary goals. And this latest story, concerning a fired Julius Baer banker who has decided to publish reams of client data on Wikileaks two days before he goes before a court, is instructive. Sure, some people who use offshore bank accounts via Zurich or wherever are up to no good, and deserve to be exposed. This is particularly the case if such persons are politicians who favour high taxes, socialist economics and the rest. When it turns out that such folk are salting away their wealth in Zurich, Zug or Geneva, it is delicious to see their discomfiture. But – and it is a big but – many people who bank offshore are not primarily looking to hide ill-gotten gains or adopting a double standard; they are people who wish to take advantage of free capital movement and “vote” with their wallets for a low tax jurisdiction. “Exit” is often more powerful than “voice”; the ability to leave a jurisdiction, as I have said before, is one of the few incentives to make oppressive regimes marginally better behaved.
Consider what Wikileaks might want to expose next: health records? The insured art collections of certain people? You can see how leaking such data could be a gift to would-be kidnappers and extortion artists. This is not a theoretical issue. Dan Mitchell and Chris Edwards, in their book, “Global Tax Revolution: the Rise of Tax Competition and the Battle to Defend It”, published in 2008 by the Cato Institute, point out that in some parts of the world, a high proportion of individuals bank offshore because their domestic governments have habitually robbed them in the past. Disclosure of financial details can lead to a person having his daughter’s body parts mailed through with a letter threatening further horrors unless a payment is made. Bank privacy is not, therefore, something that only criminals take advantage of, although that business is often portrayed that way.
Like I said, omelettes and broken eggs. We’ll see how this dish turns out.
Whilst I agree that the uncovering of secrets is a good way of defanging state power, that fact that Wikileaks and their supporters practise the same secrecy, vetting, partial disclosure and anonymity that the oppressive state uses makes them less of a cheerleader for libertarianism than they’d have us believe..
Let’s not conflate Wikileaks with “intellectual property” issues. “Intellectual property” is subject to way too much woolly thinking as it is. Wikileaks is purely about secrets.
There is a synchronicity of goals and narrative that is already being damaged. The (legacy) media is certainly not our friend and would not use any information it acquired to further liberty in any case so when it loses insider access to official narratives, that can’t hurt and probably helps.
The gain from Wikileaks is that the narrative network shrinks down towards need-to-know circles. The less overlap between circles, the less powers of one circle can be used to achieve goals of other circles. For example, breaking low level unnecessary linkages between the international war on drugs, the military, and the state department reduces the ease with which those distinct activities can be used to further ideological causes that are not part of their stated purpose.
This, however, is unfortunate and hopefully can still be achieved. We need to find out who the secret US senator is and if he is acting on behalf of House Republicans, we need to know who they are as well. I hope they are what Brian calls “Old School Republicans”. The bill is to make the changes summarized here(PDF).
As we are frequently reminded by the editorial team here –
It seems like the Scope International tagline of the 1970’s and 80’s is still true
It is a feature not a bug… that is the intention of Wikileaks… by making informal internal communications harder or even impossible due to even the most trivial topics getting ‘classified’ by paranoid apparatchiks post-Wikileaks this actually damages leviathan on a systemic level… in effect making it difficult or impossible to have the ‘watercooler conversations’ that never show up on org charts and yet are key to any institution.
This seems to me a strange and rather desperate argument and indeed the kind of overheated “what if?” that our Enemy tend to use to justify themselves. I think would-be kidnappers generally know who the rich people are already; the big houses, expensive cars and lear jets tend to be a bit of a giveaway.
Actually Ian, when I read about how to survive an economic collapse from people who’ve actually lived through an economic collapse (mostly Ferfal in Argentina) being very secretive about your banking (at least if you have any sort of money) is quite a common recommendation specifically to avoid the danger that Johnathan mentions. Sure it’s not a danger in most first world countries (yet), but in parts of South America this is a very serious danger.
I’d see it as closer to the sort of “what if?” argument people use to argue for private gun ownership or against increasing government power.
Sure it’s not a danger in most first world countries (yet), but in parts of South America this is a very serious danger.
Valid point TimP and I too are conflicted but tending towards Perry’s stand because most of the people sending money outside South America, Asia and Africa particularly are not seeking a tax haven as much hiding stolen money. Some of this money is the result of extortion from legitimate business people. Whether Wikileaks makes that distinction between the thugs and those seeking freedom to hide their money from high taxes is another matter.
I can’t imagine how the Wikileaks people would know the tax cheats from the rest. This seems like a unwarranted invasion of privacy by people who’ve become drunk on their own notoriety.
Well, well. A lot of justications going on here for leaking data from a private institution (not a government agency). And by people who consider themselves to be libertarians and presumably, defenders of private property.
Richard Thomas:
I was not conflating them, Richard. I was giving this, in a slightly tongue in cheek way, as an example of an issue that prompts disagreement. There is nit-picking and there is nit-picking!
What Eric said.
IanB:
They may have an idea who the rich are, but they often acquire, new, vital information from their cronies inside government tax offices. This is not a “desperate” point, either. The CATO book I mention lists dozens of examples of legit reasons for people concealing wealth holdings via private bank accounts.
Like I said, I find it jarring see people justifying the systematic violation of client privacy on the grounds that “they are rich bastards who are probably known about anyway”. Leave that sort of thuggery to the Guardian’s Comment is Free threads.
As I said, it’s the “if this, then maybe that” type argument I find suspicious. “If people aren’t CRB checked, then maybe paedophiles will work in schools” and so on. It’s a small point, but it seems a bit of a desperate argument. Rich people are at risk of kidnapping, sure. But security through obscurity seems a bit of a weak strategy. If you’re wealthy enough to pay a ransom, people probably know already, unless you’re living like a tramp to avoid detection, which rather ruins the point of having money, doesn’t it?
Is there a “right” to privacy? I dunno. Not sure where that would come from. I’ve never understood why blackmail is against the law, for instance. If you did something bad, and you don’t want others to find out about it, I’m not sure where you get the right for it to remain a secret. Likewise, I’m not sure I have a right to keep the size of my overdraft a secret, however much it may embarrass me for it to be revealed. Do I have a right not to be embarrassed? Is personal information a form of property akin to intellectual property?
For instance, if you were to reveal my real identity, would you have violated my rights by doing so?
I agree that there are no inherent/natural rights, so to me both property (intellectual or physical) and privacy are subject to agreement. By revealing someone’s personal or financial info, a person/institution wouldn’t be violating any rights, but would be violating an agreement to keep that info secret (an agreement which may well only be implicit). A person such as Assange, who is presumably not party to any such agreement, would be similar to someone knowingly buying stolen property.
Whilst I completely get your consequentialist objections to Wikileaks I just cannot think of anything that could be done about the site that doesn’t make me — as a Libertarian — immensely uncomfortable.
In the longer term, I hope Wikileaks turning it’s sights on private companies encourages the better use of data security within companies. At the end of the day the general point with Wikileaks is that if the “good” guys can get this data and leak it; then the “bad” guys have almost certainly already got it and have been using it without us ever knowing.
In this case, where one banker publishes client bank information before going to an employment tribunal, how many bankers before have been bribed to release that information to the nefarious parties you outline?
IanB, up to a point I see the force of your argument, but only so far. If I contract with a bank to keep certain of my fiancial affairs private, or whatever, then if a disgruntled, and sacked, ex-employee leaks my details to all and sundry, I think I have grounds for feeling somewhat pissed off.
Complete privacy is impossible and in many cases, not even desirable from the client’s point of view. But while the sort of rich persons who have offshore accounts may not be the kind of group to elicit much sympathy in these austere times, I think it is important that we don’t let certain principles go to hell.
This is an example, I think, of how the phenomenon that is WikiLeaks has become very much a double-edged thing from the liberal/libertarian point of view. In another Samizdata thread on this area, I noted that some “anti-state” libertarians were saying that WikiLeaks is a problem for the high and mighty, not the rest of us. I am not quite so sure about that.
Time, of course, will tell.
First, what Ian said. (“Privacy for me, but not for thee” is what I expect from a politician, not a transparency activist.)
Secondly, Wikileaks can’t masquerade as a “whistleblowing” effort very effectively anymore.
Whistleblowing is supposed to be calling attention to hidden wrongdoing – but when was the last time they actually revealed any wrongs?
The big State Department cables dump, at least the bits we’ve seen, hasn’t revealed much (any?) perfidy, has it?
These upcoming bank records don’t seem likely to be entirely wrongdoing, even if there’s a little in there – just one guy’s revenge on his employer.
(For that matter, even if they are all really “tax evasion” under the local codes involved, I can’t morally call it wrongdoing, myself.)
(I completely lost sympathy for the Wikileaks project when they decided to do such heavy-handed and transparent editing and framing around the “release” of the Iraq helicopter video.
Real truth-telling and whistleblowing shouldn’t require such efforts, since it stands on its own. When you have to stoop to manipulating, editing, and framing like that you’re revealing how little the raw data supports you.
And then you’re not a whistleblower, you’re just another cheap partisan. At least most partisans are open about it.)
I maintain that the whole question of Wikileaks is distorted by their clever choice of name. “Wikeleaks” seems to imply some kind of open source of information, like Wikipedia. But that’s not how Wikileaks works at all. Wikileaks is a small cabal who decides, amongst themselves, what information to reveal and what not to reveal, strictly to promote their own political goals. I might be opposed to that even if I supported their goals, and I strongly suspect I do not support their goals.
What Alisa and Ian B said on privacy.
Johnathan said
“A lot of justications going on here for leaking data from a private institution (not a government agency). And by people who consider themselves to be libertarians and presumably, defenders of private property. ”
No, not presumably. I am against the infringing of private property by the use of force. But it is the use of force that is the important factor, not the fact that private property is what is being infringed. It is not impossible to imagine a society where the only thing that could keep private property private was coercive action by the government. You may respond that the government is already acting in this role as the defender of the rule of law. But what I am referring to is a society where private property is infringed in an incidental manner, without malice. This is already the case for intellectual property, although I accept that it isn’t a perfect analogy. Imagine a society where everybody was a telepath and couldn’t but help hearing your thoughts. No private intellectual property possible. Should we make everybody wear lead helmets or whatever was required to keep the brainwaves in?
As has been pointed out, there are costs to transparency; you don’t want would be kidnappers knowing how much money you have in the bank. But the risk that others will hurt you because they know something about you that you would rather keep secret can be adjusted for by you taking counterbalancing measures, such as investing in personal security. This trade off exists already and there is nothing to say that you have a right to a particular balance. Bringing in the government to ensure that you get the particular mix that you wish is reminiscent of a ‘gimme right’. You could of course say that anything that causes you displeasure or inconvenience is a violation of your rights, but then we are back to the positive/negative rights discussion.
As far as the leaking banker is concerned. Sure, I don’t approve of what he is doing, but ultimately its a case of buyer beware. These people exist and mostly work for the government.
Jonathon, you are right. You have my apologies. I was reading what I expected to read rather than what was written.
WRT the leak itself, to avoid the actual Wikileaks issue for a moment, what it reveals to me is that the banks (or whatever institution it was leaked from) has too lax security. Even if Wikileaks hadn’t have leaked it, it would quite possibly have been available to those who knew it was there and wanted it. Of course, if it is information demanded from private institutions then leaked (either from incompetence or malignancy), you’re pretty SOL.
It’s beginning to be fairly naive to believe that anything outside of your head is really private. And even that not for long.
It’s possible to support Wikileaks objectives and some of their leaks while still believing that they should have refrained from publishing some of the material that they have published (or intend to).
PeterT writes:
Not sure I follow. It is true that nowadays, bankers must comply with all kinds of anti-money laundering rules and act as snitches for the government (failure to report cash transactions above a certain level can lead to criminal prosecution in the UK, for example.) However, in general terms a private banker is not a government employee, therefore your point hardly stands.
If a private sector employee of a firm that I have transacted with in good faith steals my personal information either for personal gain, or to make some sort of political point, I am entitled to sue the bastard. To say “let the buyer beware” is hardly relevant in cases where a provable, measurable piece of harm has been done.
Imagine if a private doctor sells clients’ medical records for a fee, without the clients’ consent. I don’t think “let the buyer beware” is going to save the doctor from a serious lawsuit, or worse.
RichardT, no offence taken.
I should add that of course, what such episodes do is raise the level of scrutiny that anyone undergoes if they try to get a job in places such as private banks. Background checks, etc. People who embellish the resumes, for example, can be punished severely and blacklisted.
I was interested by what the bank employee said (the man who stole the secrets in the first place).
People trying to evade tax were “damaging our society”.
Think about that …….
First he is confusing civil society with THE STATE.
Also he is assuming that there is really only one state – his thinking assumes one big international government (either now – or in the future).
He really is going as far as this – after all he did NOT claim that anyone was trying to cheat private contracts (i.e. a civil society relationship), or even (as far as I know) that people were evading Swiss taxes.
No – British (or any other taxes) were “society” and they were “our” society.
Julian A, himself speaks in the same way – the progressive world community (and so on).
Where does this sort of thinking come from?
People who know me know what I am going to type next – but it needs to be said again (and again, and again….).
It comes from the education system and the media.
Switzerland (once a highly conservative country) has an education system dominated by the same sort of people who dominate it most other countries (the people who NATURALLY come to dominate a tax financed system, regualted by the state).
They spread their leftist doctrines – “anti discrimination”,, “social justice” (and so on and so on) into the minds of school children and university students.
And to guard against the real world undermining the influence of this brainwashing – the mass media (especially radio and television) reenforce the doctrines every day. Remember there are no conservative or libertarian television stations in Switzerland – like education everything has to be “objective” which, in reality, means DOMINATED BY THE CONDITIONING THEMES OF THE LEFT.
It is not a wonder that people like this ex bank employee are leftists – in fact it is a wonder that the entre population is not fanatical leftists.
Actually most people (most of the time) show a high degree of resistance to this intense brainwashing (which is what the education system and the MSM actually are), perhaps not enough to save civilization but astonishing just the same.
The destruction of civilization has (and is) taking the left much longer than might have been predicted. They are getting there – but there does seem to be “Common Sense” survival instinct in most people, one the left have (and are) found it hard to totally defeat.
I repeat that if any places in the modern West are to survive it will be those places (if they exist) where the left do not have a de facto monopoly on education and on the media (and NO, print media dissent is not enough).
Johnathan, by ‘these people’ I simply meant untrustworthy individuals rather than bankers. Of course bankers exist, and not mostly in the government. It was half in jest that I suggested that most untrustworthy individuals work in government.
Sure you can sue, but I am sure you would rather not have had your bank details disclosed to begin with, so I would still suggest that you beware. I accept that both recourse to legal action as well as buyer beware are part of what make the system work.
Anyway, my last paragraph was hardly want I wanted people to focus on.
“Consider what Wikileaks might want to expose next: health records?”
Hold on… Wikileaks is really about exposing US diplomatic cables, isn’t it? If there is anybody’s health records in it, you should be asking why thousands of US diplomats would have access to such information.
Wikileaks just exposes the hypocrisy of the US government. For example, why does the US officially support Turkey’s membership in the EU when American diplomats find Turkish government intentions “questionable.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,732084,00.html
Here is a excerpt:
“Some AKP politicians, according to a US assessment, support Turkish membership in the EU for “murky” and “muddled” reasons, for example because they believe Turkey must spread Islam in Europe. A US dispatch from late 2004 reports that a member of a leading AKP think tank said that Turkey’s role is “to take back Andalusia and avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683.”
Perhaps if there was more honesty in mainstream media, we wouldn’t need Wikileaks.