This is one of the things that WikiLeaks counteracts. Their work discloses information that politicians in power would have wanted to keep out of sight, because they think it is embarrassing or something that the general public does not need to know.
However, the general public does need to know, if the democratic system is to work as intended. If citizens do not need to know what their politicians are doing, general elections will become nothing more but a shot in the dark. We must be able to scrutinise our politicians, and, if necessary, replace them with better ones.
When the US administration and governments of officials in other countries try to silence WikiLeaks, much more is at stake than just a particular web site. What these politicians and their officials are trying, is to deprive our democracy of the very oxygen it needs to survive.
Cablegate leaks
As an example, let us have a look at some of the Cablegate leaks that relate to Sweden. Thanks to WikiLeaks we now know that there is some kind of security and intelligence cooperation going on between the US and Sweden that not even Swedish elected members of parliament are supposed to be informed about. So, not only the citizens, but also their democratically elected representatives are kept in the dark. This is important information and it is very valuable that it has now been disclosed.
Thanks to WikiLeaks we now know that the Swedish Social Democrat party asked the US for help in handling the Afghanistan issue during the general election last fall. This is important information and we can only regret that it did not appear before the election when voters and media could have confronted the party and demanded an explanation.
Thanks to WikiLeaks we now know that big American corporations are using the US State Department to push countries like Sweden on issues related to copyright and file sharing. This is important information that should be taken into account when future legislative proposals are presented in this area. It is important for the public debate to know who the driving force is in this and other policy areas.
There are those who think it would have been better if we had not known. That issues like these are best handled discretely behind closed doors. That citizens, media and in some cases members of parliaments should not get involved or informed.
This is quite a remarkable opinion to hold in a representative democracy. When senior politicians are attacking WikiLeaks and use every means at their disposal to silence it, they are in fact attacking democracy itself.
They would of course deny this and it may even be that they are so blinded that they honestly cannot see what they are doing. But this is beside the point. The important thing is that we do not let them succeed.
In the short run, WikiLeaks is important because of the information we get regarding various politically relevant topics. This is good in itself. But in the longer run, it will have an even more profound effect. It is one of the oldest truths in politics that power corrupts and neither WikiLeaks nor the Internet in general can change human nature.
However, thanks to new information technology, the risk of getting caught and exposed has increased dramatically for politicians and governments who want to rely on shady back room deals.
It will take them a while to get used to this fact, and they most certainly will not like it. But in the end, they will have to adjust and become more open. This is the promise that WikiLeaks brings to democracy.
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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. The article was first published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Brussels.
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Christian Engström was born in Högalid, Stockholm. He graduated from Stockholm University in 1983 with a degree in mathematics and computer science. From 1978 he worked at a small company which specialised in phonetic similarity searches for trademark names. Engström also worked for five years as an unpaid activist within the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), lobbying against software patents. He was active in the campaign against the EU software patent directive, which was rejected by the European Parliament in July 2005. Christian Engström was elected a Member of the European Parliament in 2009 for the Pirate Party. After negotiations with several the political groups of the European Parliament Engström joined the Greens/EFA Group.
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