All good government depends on the operation of checks against misrule. The governors, if they enjoyed total freedom to do as they wished, would use that freedom to secure the greatest happiness for themselves and their friends, and let the rest of society languish in poverty and despair. If this proposition is doubted, reflection on the histories of slave labour, empires, and despotism will clarify the matter: there is virtually no limit to the evils that human beings are prepared to inflict upon each other, when they believe they can profit from them, and when they are safe from adverse consequences. The existence of government itself is founded on the principle that people cannot be expected to act well when it is their interest to act badly: an authority, therefore, is required to dispense justice, and prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
The end of government should be to promote the interest of every member of the community, and not to promote the interest of a small class to the detriment of all others. It is therefore evident that strong checks on government authority are required; and among the most important of the checks against misrule is the freedom of the press: the freedom to publish opinions and information.
When governments do wrong, the freedom to censure them, and publicise their wrongs, enables the community to identify and correct abuses. But ruling classes, alert to this danger, have shrouded government in secrecy. They have created laws to conceal information involving the most essential public interests, and worked diligently to punish those who reveal the truth.
The injurious effects of this secrecy manifest in two modes. The first is perpetuating error. If a government intends to do good, but acts badly by mistake, simply because it does not know how to act well, then secrecy prevents the community from drawing all its intellects into discussions of how to rectify the mistake. The consequence is that errors that could be rapidly corrected are instead needlessly prolonged, with all the suffering that such delay entails. The second mode is deliberate misrule, which is by far the more common case. When the government intends to do evil—which happens frequently, because the governors believe that cruelty is profitable to them and their class—they will often conceal their policy. Some evil measures, it is true, they will try to defend in public discussion; but the measures over which they will be most reticent to offer to scrutiny are those that are especially barbarous or disreputable, and can be carried out with a relatively low risk of detection. Acts of this sort include the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners, crimes committed in war, and the private corrupt transactions of politicians. If these acts remain secret, and known only to the rulers, the community is prevented from either identifying or correcting them: a door is thus opened to every injustice and abuse imaginable, and those of the most disgraceful kind. The sanction of the law, and even the less forceful sanction of public opinion, are made impotent.
The difference between these two modes of detriment is that a government which does wrong by mistake may eventually, by experiment, find its way to the right policy. But a government which deliberately does wrong, for as long as it can rely upon the shield of secrecy, will continue to do wrong. If secrecy can be kept up forever, then the government will do wrong forever, and defeat the purpose for which government should exist—to serve the common good.
It may therefore be affirmed with confidence, that secrecy is, in part, responsible for the failure of modern democracies to produce good government. The voters in these democracies enjoy the right to change their government when it does wrong; and this is acknowledged to be a crucial security for the people’s interests. But the right of voters to change their government is only beneficial insofar as voters possess complete and accurate information. There is no advantage in replacing a bad government with a government equally bad, or worse. To make a good choice, voters must know the policies of the government, the policies of the government’s opponents, and be competent to judge which policies are best. If voters cannot access complete and accurate information, they are forced to proceed either on false impressions, or on guesses, and are therefore denied the ability to make a good choice, except perhaps by accident. Such is the situation produced by secrecy: the voters, being denied essential information, cannot act with wisdom. Instead, their opinions are founded on information that has been preselected by the government: the governors, therefore, are enabled to choose the opinions of the voters for them. It is obvious what will happen in these circumstances. The government, by concealing information that reflects poorly upon it, will give the voters a mistaken impression of its policies: more praise, and less blame, will be given to the governors than they deserve. And since the voters’ opinions have been distorted in this manner, when an election arrives, they will be incompetent to make a good choice. Without freedom of information, universal suffrage is a feeble safeguard against misgovernment; the franchise, if exercised ignorantly, is useless.
It follows from the preceding considerations that one of the most beneficial functions a free press can perform is the disclosure of information which it is in the interest of the public to know, and which the government desires to conceal. Each revelation adds to the people’s sum of knowledge, and increases the probability that misgovernment will be remedied. Far from being punished, then, those who divulge such information should be rewarded as some of the foremost servants of the community.
Julian Assange, as a journalist and publisher of classified information through WikiLeaks, has distinguished himself as perhaps the best public servant of this type. He and his colleagues exposed appalling and grievous crimes, and thus gave justice a chance to be administered. To our collective and lasting shame, this chance was squandered. The murderers and torturers escaped any serious penalties, while, in a complete perversion of law and morals, Assange was subjected to agonizing punishment for more than a decade: first during his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and then in the maximum security Belmarsh prison.
Assange now walks free; he has been reunited with his partner and children; and his terrible ordeal has concluded. This is not to be attributed to the generosity of the American or British governments, which so long persecuted him under a thin judicial screen. Assange is free today because of the tireless efforts of his legal counsel, and the concerted work of thousands of campaigners, and numerous organisations, for his release. The ruling classes, like the many ruling classes that preceded them, had to be torn from their instinctual barbarism by the patient labours of civilised people. To appreciate the extent of that barbarism, readers should consult the courageous and admirable volume by Nils Melzer, The Trial of Julian Assange.
We should relish this rare triumph of liberty over vicious authority, yet we must remember that the work initiated by Assange is very far from done. Governments continue to pile up secrets, to reject the democratic principle of scrutiny, and to hound the disclosers of the truth. If good government is our object, therefore, the struggle against official secrecy must continue.