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n the 24th of May 2010, Private Chelsea E. Manning was arrested by the United States government on suspicion of leaking classified military material to WikiLeaks. Manning was an intelligence analyst within the US army, and in 2009 was deployed to Iraq where she had access to classified military databases. In January 2010, increasingly disenchanted with the actions of the US military, Manning began to download files from these databases and saving the material to a CD labelled 'Lady Gaga'. After smuggling the data out of the office and returning to the USA, Manning initially tried to pass the material to Washington Post and the New York Times; neither paper replied, so she began sending material to WikiLeaks. This material included the video of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike (subsequently termed ‘collateral murder’), the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan and 400,000 documents that came to be known as the ‘Iraq War Logs’ and the ‘Afghan War Diary’. These classified documents, including state department cables, provided details of the officially sanctioned cover up of rape and sexual torture (including of children) by military contractors, the indiscriminate shooting of Iraqis, Reuters’ news staff and those attending to their injuries, including two children.

Importantly for the academy, the leaked material, despite now being in the public domain, has never been declassified. We explore two types of data: the data leaked by Manning and released by Wikileaks, and the material of her subsequent court-martial released through Freedom Of Information (FOIA) requests. The term ‘obfuscated democracy’ names processes of obscuring access to this information within so-called liberal democracies (Belcher & Martin 2013). Should Manning’s leaked data be considered legally available? What are the nuances of how academics are able to engage with these materials? Therefore the term obfuscated is carefully chosen, for its connotations of rendering unclear, unintelligible, muddying and bewilderment all speak to research conducted against this lack of transparency. This is not to say, however, that such information is necessarily obstructed (although, it may be), for this implies a deliberate attempt to place barriers in the path of access to particular forms and sites of information. The term obfuscation does not deny that such obstacles exist, but it signals a wider, emergent obscurity within democratic processes. Indeed, obfuscate derives from the Latin obfuscare meaning darkness, and it is this absence of illuminating clarity over the processes of obtaining publically accessible information within democratic systems that we are exploring in this essay. Obfuscated democracy is this procedural darkness; a clouding over of the procedures allowing access to information without necessarily an outright refusal.Access to the US Army’s FOIA website: Obfuscation or Obstruction?

The majority of the released Manning court martial data is available on the US Army FOIA website, where we encountered a tension between public accountability and obfuscating practices. There are aspects of the website that - at the time of writing this essay - make it difficult to use, and more importantly, seem like a ‘risky’ venture for the researcher or interested member of the public. This is because on arriving at the website the first thing a visitor is ordinarily confronted with is a warning about an expired security certificate [Figure 1].

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This aspect of the encounter depends on the user’s web browser, so the lapsed certificate will present itself in one of a number of similar ways. When using Alphabet’s (formerly Google) Chrome browser for example, the visitor is encouraged to return ‘Back to safety’, which redirects the user to the Google search page. The waning of the lapsed certificate induces an alert stating that ‘Your connection is not private’ and an additional warning that there is the possibility that the site may be being used by ‘attackers’ to steal the visitor’s information and potentially their identity. This is unlikely to encourage users to remain on the site, or proceed further [Figure 2]. Only then can a user proceed to the actual website and the location of the documents.[caption id="attachment_11818" align="alignnone" width="300"]

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If the users reach the FOIA site it initially appears to be well constructed, with a clear layout and some information on the documents held (e.g. the title, filename and metadata). However, there are some elements of the website interface that make downloading the documents problematic. Whilst the site does list individual documents that can be searched, the functionality is limited, for the searchable metadata (such as keywords) is limited. Furthermore, when the user downloads a document it becomes apparent that many documents (although not all) are stored together in large numbers in large ZIP files [Figure 3].

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Crucially, these files do not report their size to the web browser and therefore the user does not know how long this download is going to take [Figure 3]. When the files are finally downloaded, they are (as is often the case with FOIA requests) heavily redacted and not keyword searchable, as many of the documents are in fact images embedded in PDF containers.

When these attributes are understood together, and placed in the wider context of warning against access, we suggest that it would not be unreasonable for the user to abandon downloading the files for fear that they are not what they appear to be, or that the download process is taking too long. These features of the US Army’s FOIA website are not new, and as of November 2018 this has been the situation with this site for at least 3 years. It is also worth noting that it is likely they have the capacity to install a valid certificate should they wish.

Yet is this a deliberate practice of obstructing access to this data? We are careful here not to attribute conspiracy to incompetence (or neglect). As this is a site where the US Army disseminates information released in response to FOIA requests, one could argue that this is information that they would not otherwise willingly release. Making this part of their website easily accessible is therefore not a high priority. It is also worth noting here that an expired security certificate is an effective barrier to a site being indexed by search engines, which significantly reduces the likelihood of the US Army’s FOIA website appearing in search-engine results. Importantly therefore, this does not necessarily mean that this was done intentionally. The security certificate may once have been valid, and when it expired its renewal may have been caught between the multiple actors comprising an (in)coherent bureaucratic assemblage. Perhaps therefore the state of the website reflects convenient neglect? As consequence of this complication, access to this data becomes obfuscated.

Yet this cannot be ‘proven’, and if challenged officials within U.S government would likely issue a plausible denial. We can therefore situate this within a wider climate of paranoia. For a refusal of access would be easier to challenge (Belcher & Martin 2013; Gill 2016), yet these dissipated obstructions of website neglect are harder to link to a specific actor or intention. This obfuscates the cause(s) of the difficulty of accessing the data, and therefore removes the likelihood of pinning these seemingly mundane website practices to the intentional actions of specific state actions.‍

A politics of knowledge curation?

“I worry most about academia and the particular part of academia that is dealing with international relations. WikiLeaks has published over 2 million diplomatic cables. […] There has been some research published in Spanish and in Asian languages. But where are the American and English journals? There is a concrete explanation: They act as feeder schools for the US State Department. The US association that controls the big five international relations journals, the ISA, has a quiet, official policy of not accepting any paper that is derived from WikiLeaks’ materials.” (Assange in Norton 2015)

In the 2015 book The Wikileaks Files, Julian Assange makes the claim that due to the “religious hysteria” of anti-Wikileaks sentiment in many US government departments, scholarly attention within International Relations has been reluctant to conduct analysis of Wikileaks publications (Wikileaks & Assange 2016, 9–10). Assange goes on to make a stronger claim that the lack of publications on Wikileaks within International Relations is “not merely odd, but suspicious”, noting that the leading US international relations journal International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) has a policy against accepting papers based on Wikileaks material (ibid). Whilst perhaps conspiratorial, it is interesting to read this statement in the context of The International Studies Association (ISA) response to wider claims of restrictions on academic freedom:

“It has been discussed among the ISA journal editors in the context of any legal issues related to materials used from WikiLeaks. That discussion centered on the implications of publishing material that is legally prohibited by the US government,” Boyer said. “But no policy has been made and the issue has not been widespread in journal submissions.” (Boyer, in Norton 2015).

One likely justification for this ambiguous stance is that the US cables material has never been declassified, despite being widely available in the public domain. It is therefore significant that the data occupies an unusual status: as simultaneously public and classified. The ISA’s policy is in place to protect their journals from “handling manuscripts that make use of leaked documents if such use could be construed as mishandling classified material” (Michael 2015). The paradoxical status of the US cable material (and indeed all leaked material) therefore presents a challenge to journalists, writers, academics, and publishers, particularly when aiming to hold governments to account. Further, many (critical) Geography and International Relations Departments in the US, are affiliated with, or integrated into schools with Diplomacy courses which may impact their ability to engage with academic debate in this area (e.g. Syracuse University).

These rumors of prejudice against, and actual bans on, Wikileaks-derived academic analysis may have an impact on the discussions of Chelsea Manning taking place in academia; it also challenges the principle of academic freedom. A number of leading US universities discourage students and staff from using the materials; in a leaked email from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) the advice went as far as to suggest that students refrain from linking to or tweeting leaked materials [Figure 4]. This took the form of warning students that the use of leaked material might bring into question their suitability for handling government materials, and therefore by implication suggesting that they might damage their future employability [Figure 4]. However, this advice, including the email from Columbia University’s SIPA, was retracted soon after it was released (Gustin 2010).

From: Office of Career Services

Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:26 PM

Subject: Wikileaks - Advice from an alum

To: "Office of Career Services (OCS)"

Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government. 

Regards,

Office of Career Services

Figure 4: Text of email from Columbia University (Gustin 2010)

Concluding reflections

What does this mean for the academy? How should we engage with these obfuscatory practices? What are the implications of this for knowledge production? The question of whether or not academics can (or should) publish using leaked classified documents, such as those leaked by Manning and published by WikiLeaks, has yet to be addressed. On the one hand, there are claims from WikiLeaks of an organized attempt by the United States government to influence what is deemed suitable material for academic research, and warnings of potential consequences for those that do engage with the materials from universities. On the other hand, there are publications in academic journals that employ leaked documents, albeit largely in law, and therefore it is clearly possible for academics to work in this area (work in Political Geography and International Relations remains notably muted). Another reason however, may simply be that this data is not relevant or useful for Political Geographers and scholars of International Relations. Further research is required as to the apparent lack of engagement with this material by internet geographers, and those who engage with ‘big data’ more broadly.

The future situation in the UK could be even more problematic, as the proposed changes to the UK Espionage Act would make the publication or possession of leaked material unlawful. This situation therefore raises important questions of what access the academy should have to leaked material, whether the academy could resort to a public interest defense of publication, and the academy’s role as a check or balance on state power.

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Reference List

Belcher, O, and Martin, L. L. (2013) “Ethnographies of Closed Doors: Conceptualising Openness and Closure in US Immigration and Military Institutions: Ethnographies of Closed Doors.” Area 45(4):403-10

Gill, N. (2016) Nothing Personal?: Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Gustin, S. (2010). “Columbia University Reverses Anti-WikiLeaks Guidance.” Wired [Online] Available here. Accessed 28th January 2018.

Michael, G. J. (2015). “Who’s Afraid of WikiLeaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science Research.” The Review of Policy Research 32 (2): 175–99.

Norton, B. (2015). Assange: US Academia Helps the State Department. Medium [Online] Available here  Accessed 29th January 2018

Wikileaks, and Assange, J (2016). The WikiLeaks Files: The World according to US Empire. London: Verso.

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