Diplomacy (Internet)

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Joseph Johnson (Orpington) (Con)]

I am grateful for the chance to hold this debate, which will be the last in Westminster Hall this year. I am indebted to the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) for sparing time in the pre-Christmas rush to be here, as well as to the Minister for indulging my interest in the subject in a conversation in the Tea Room a fortnight ago, during which he suggested that I apply for this debate. I hope he is not now regretting that I was successful in the ballot.

The subject is undeniably topical. Anybody doubting the transformational impact of the internet on diplomacy need look only at how the dissemination of hundreds of thousands of sensitive US diplomatic cables through the WikiLeaks website is rocking Governments throughout the world. That was why I entered the ballot, because I wanted to see whether I could draw some preliminary lessons from the WikiLeaks affair. Before I turn to WikiLeaks directly, however, I want to point out that the internet presents opportunities for, as well as threats to, our diplomats. New internet tools have extended the reach of our ideas by circumventing politically motivated censorship and enabling citizens living in oppressive regimes to exercise their rights of free expression, if unfortunately only on a stop-go basis.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, like many other diplomatic services, has developed a substantial “digital diplomacy” initiative in recent years. A more web-savvy FCO has our diplomats blogging and tweeting away as they make Britain’s case in an informal way with audiences around the world. The FCO is also experimenting with intensive online campaigns, notably its Nuclear 2010 campaign in support of UK objectives for the review of the non-proliferation treaty, the campaign to secure the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the campaign to shape global opinion during the London G20 summit. However, there is no easy-to-download app for every diplomatic challenge the UK faces. Adapting to new technologies is never easy for big organisations.

Recent events have shown how easily the same internet technologies can usher in as many diplomatic disasters as breakthroughs. The fateful decision in June 2010 of a former US army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, to give some 260,000 US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the website dedicated to publishing confidential material, has been a wake-up call to foreign services around the world. I would like to reflect on some of the lessons that we might learn from the recent experience, which I believe marks a watershed in the relationship between diplomacy and the internet.

It is three weeks since The Guardian, along with four other news organisations—The New York Times, El País, Le Monde and Der Spiegel—began publishing extracts from the cables that Julian Assange had directly or indirectly made available in the first instance just to them. As yet, they have neither dumped the entire dataset into the public domain, nor published names that would endanger innocent individuals. I believe they have so far acted in a responsible manner. I have spoken to other newspaper editors who said they would have behaved in exactly the same way. I fundamentally disagree with Senator Joseph Lieberman, who accused The New York Times of

“at the very least an act of bad citizenship”.

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman about the language of both Senator Lieberman and my friend Vice-President Joe Biden, who described Assange as a terrorist. None the less, the names were given of three senior Thai officials animadverting on the sexual and other behaviours of the Crown Prince. If a courtier in Buckingham Palace did that, presumably not an awful lot would happen to him, but I am not so sure about Thailand, so I do not think the hon. Gentleman is right to say that all the revelations are harmless. In the Kremlin, Putin’s people have said that they now know the names of some of these people and they will be taking action. I would be quaking in my boots thanks to The Guardian and Assange because of some of the names put on the web.

[Joseph Johnson]

It is regrettable if people have been put in a position that makes them vulnerable to reprisals. I was not aware of the instance to which the right hon. Gentleman refers or of the fact that Putin had said that he was in a position to take action. I suspect that part of that may be bluff. Perhaps he wishes that he knew who was responsible.

Foreign policy in this country and in many democracies that are otherwise healthy is fundamentally and woefully underscrutinised. In Britain, for example, a Prime Minister can sign international treaties and take a country to war without a vote in Parliament. Foreign Office questions in Parliament come round only once every five sitting weeks. The culture of bipartisanship and the parochial nature of domestic politics stifle scrutiny of foreign policy making, but WikiLeaks is starting to change some of that. We can see that millions of people around the world, many of them in countries that have been denied a free media, have glimpsed truths about their rulers and Governments that had previously been hidden from them or that they had merely suspected. The Guardian is right to claim that the cables have revealed

“wrongdoing, war crimes, corruption, hypocrisy, greed, espionage, double-dealing and the cynical exercise of power on a wondrous scale.”

The fact that there has been public interest in an airing of these documents—or a large majority of them—is beyond question. We have learned from the revelations, among thousands of other things, that Saudi Arabia and other Arab Governments sided with Israel in urging the US to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb; that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership, demanding e-mail addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers, credit card details and frequent flyer numbers; that there could be a shift in relations between China and North Korea, with suggestions that Beijing might not intervene if the reclusive regime in Pyongyang collapsed; that there are concerns over Pakistan’s growing instability, the security of its nuclear weapons and suspicions that the Inter-Services Intelligence is backing the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan; that there are suspicions of corruption in the Afghan Government, with one cable alleging that Vice-President Zia Massoud was carrying $52 million in cash when he was stopped during a visit to the UAE; that Russia and its intelligence agencies are using mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations, with one cable describing the country as a “virtual mafia state”; that there is a close relationship between Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, which is causing intense US suspicion; and that US commanders, the Afghan President and local officials in Helmand have privately been critical of the UK’s military operations in Afghanistan.

Those are just a few of the highlights that have been picked up and re-published by thousands of newspapers and all other forms of media organisations all over the world. There will be more to come, but what is clear is that there is massive global interest in this extraordinary deluge of information. That is not because Assange and the “information-must-be-free” brigade at WikiLeaks have given these documents a global circulation, but because thousands of editors at hundreds of media organisations in dozens of countries throughout the world have all judged that there is a compelling public interest justifying publication.

It is possible to start drawing some lessons from the WikiLeaks saga. Just as the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon papers case more than three decades ago, it is, first and foremost, for Governments to protect their own secrets. It is not the job of the media to do so, unless there is a compelling national security reason to hold back from publication. The WikiLeaks affair has reignited the debate about where the line should be drawn between the right to a free press and freedom of speech, and the interests of national security. It has intensified what is an eternal and essentially unresolvable conflict. On the one hand, we defend and demand freedom of expression and the ideal of a free press but, on the other hand, we accept the limits to those freedoms in the interests of national security.

Those at the freedom-of-expression end of the debate have hailed Assange as a hero for revealing double-dealing and hypocrisy around the world. He is called the new Jason Bourne by Jemima Khan, the Ned Kelly of the cyber age by members of the press in Australia, and a libertine 007 by those who note his fondness for martinis. They point out that people living in countries with repressive Governments who lack a free media have a great hunger to read what their rulers have been saying and that we deny them that right at our peril.

To such people, it must appear hypocritical for the US to argue that the internet can be a force for transparent and democratic Government, and for accountability and democracy around the world, and then to condemn as “nihilists” those who use internet technology to allow greater scrutiny of US foreign policy making. I have considerable sympathy for that line of argument—what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I have not been persuaded by those on the national security side of the argument who have accused the WikiLeaks founder of being an information or info-tech “terrorist”, to use the word cited by Vice-President Biden, which was mentioned earlier by the right hon. Member for Rotherham, and of putting the lives of civilians and troops in danger. Thus far, as I said earlier, I think that the redaction of names and other sensitive information by The Guardian and the four other media organisations entrusted with the cables has been extremely diligent and painstaking. Of course, any broader distribution of the cables beyond this core group of responsible media organisations might considerably increase the risks to individuals named, especially if standards of care drop. For the moment, however, I am yet to be convinced that the release of the cables will increase the vulnerability of the US to attack, as has been rather melodramatically suggested.

I also take with a pinch of salt the way in which US diplomats have been touring TV studios invoking the sanctity of diplomatic communications, as per the Vienna convention on consular relations. That international treaty was signed in 1963 by 172 countries. Among other things, it guarantees the inviolability of the diplomatic bag and other communications from embassies back to their home countries. I am sceptical, first, because it is states that are signatories to that convention, rather than media organisations, and, secondly, because of the revelation in the leaked cables that the US seems to use staff in some of its embassies as part of a global espionage network tasked with obtaining not only information from the people whom those staff meet, but a wealth of personal details, including even DNA material.

A second lesson is that it would be dismaying if there were now to be an attempt in the US to prosecute Julian Assange for his role in publishing the documents. I say that because I think that such an attempt would conflate the role of the media with that of espionage, which in turn would have a chilling effect on investigative journalism, the purpose of which is to unearth “what they don’t want you to know”. It would be one thing if Julian Assange had encouraged, helped or conspired with Bradley Manning to leak the material, but Assange claims—and there is no reason at this point to disbelieve him—never to have even heard the informant’s name until he read it in an article in Wired magazine that mentioned Manning’s arrest. I am no lawyer, but unless it can be established that there is a bona fide ground for Assange to be charged under the US Espionage Act, he surely deserves to be regarded as a publisher and a journalist, which in a US court of law would entitle him to protection under the first amendment to the US constitution. From the limited information that is publicly available, I see little substantive difference between Assange’s role and that of The Guardian, The New York Times and others in running the story contained in the cables that he passed on to them. Neither he nor they were the original leakers.

Thirdly, the WikiLeaks affair shows us that technology is making it much more difficult to keep information confidential. It has exposed the extent to which internet technology makes possible security breaches on a scale that was unimaginable in an era of paper-based communication. As Sir Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador to the US in the Blair years, has pointed out, paper would have been impossible to steal in such quantities. The cables themselves came from a huge secret internet protocol router network—a database that was kept separate from the ordinary civilian internet and run by the Department of Defence in Washington. Since the attacks of September 2001, there has been a move in the US to link up archives of Government information in the hope that key intelligence no longer gets trapped in information silos or “stovepipes”. This database can be accessed not only by anyone in the State Department, but by anyone in the US military who has security clearance up to the secret level, a password and a computer connected to the database, which astonishingly covers more than 3 million people, including Private Bradley Manning.

The US Government have now announced a thorough review of the principles on which they share the information that they collect—I am sure that the Saudi King, for example, will be relieved to hear that. Safeguarding sources is critical to any information-gathering exercise and after such a breach, rebuilding the trust of many thousands of sources will be a painstaking exercise. The US’s experience is therefore a salutary lesson for all other diplomatic services around the world. I will be interested to know whether the Foreign Office proposes a similar review.

We are at a watershed in relations between the Government and the new internet media. The UK Government have a clear choice as to whether to promote a transparency agenda or to seek the false comfort of the old culture of secrecy and repression. I would prefer Britain to choose to become a more open and less secretive society, rather than to leave it to the likes of Julian Assange to force openness upon us. Rather than tightening further our draconian Official Secrets Act and threatening to prosecute journalists and whistleblowers, Governments should focus on making more information available and protecting only that which can cause substantive harm.

It is worth noting that none of the released documents was classified as top secret and much of the information in the 6% of documents classified as secret was already publicly known. Furthermore, these documents were likely to be released anyway in the course of freedom of information requests.

Of course, media organisations must exercise caution when revealing possibly sensitive information that could endanger lives, and this country should respect defence advisory notices when they are reasonably issued. However, new technologies have the potential to transform diplomacy and foreign policy making for the better in the long run. Studies of the effects of right-to-information legislation in numerous countries have found that there has been little impact on the amount of information recorded and that opinions have not been blunted following an increase in transparency. There is no chilling effect. In fact, according to Article 19, an independent human rights organisation that works globally to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression, the quality of some documents has improved, because the people writing them know that they will become public one day. They therefore focus on the provision of real political analysis rather than tittle-tattle and colour.

Officials have a duty to pass on important information, and that is not lifted because of fears that it one day may become public. By forcing greater transparency in foreign policy making, I believe that WikiLeaks will ultimately have a beneficial effect on the conduct of diplomacy. Let us continue to embrace the new technologies, not smother them at birth.