The WikiLeaks founder, 52-year old Julian Assange who returned to his country Australia recently, is widely regarded as a hero because as a long established hacker he used to gain access to others’ secrets and share and publish them. He is best known for his website WikiLeaks which made thousands of American government secrets public. The exact details of his activities and actions against him are well known and don’t bear repetition. But the 14-year old saga throws up two interesting questions: how does a perpetrator of theft become a public hero and why do governments and others react so poorly to the revelations of often inane secrets.

To take the second question first, fact is that large organisations lack judgment. Their size alone, they think, is a guarantor of wisdom and, hence, in the case of governments, the upholding of the public interest. In reality they are quite the opposite. Large organisations, both private and public, can actually harm the public interest and that knowledge makes them more secretive. It was in this overall framework that India had enacted the right to information law in 2005. Its basic purpose was to prevent the government and its agents from hiding behind the Official Secrets Act when they had acted foolishly, criminally, negligently and cavalierly. In the two decades since then, the Act has been systematically diminished by successive governments, because all governments detest transparency. The Indian public’s right to know as to why an agent of the government acted in the way he or she did now exists in a hugely abridged form. In effect, the governments have been saying to their citizens ‘you don’t have a right to know even when the categories exempted by the RTI Act are not involved’. Laws on data are expected to have safeguards to protect citizen’s privacy against sweeping national security and public interest clauses that can be used to clam up on information or breach individual privacy. It is in this regard that Assange has made a positive contribution.

However, some would ask whether the ends justify the means in Assange’s case. He resorted to what many would call theft, even if there was a moral justification for it. His acolytes are enamored of the Robin Hood syndrome. Hood was an English fictional brigand created by 14th century balladeers to glorify, among other things, the idea of stealing from the rich and distributing the proceeds to the poor. Karl Marx also had the same idea a few centuries later. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon even said “property is theft”.

Be that as it may, there is no real and abiding solution to the problem of transparency because, where governments are concerned, it involves disclosing processes involved in decision-making. It has opened up thousands of irrelevant or unnecessary questions. But this inconvenience cannot outweigh the ‘right to information’ as a public good.

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