- Bruno Latour, Visualization and Congnition: thinking with eyes and hands, Knowledge and Society, 1986.We take for granted that there exist, somewhere in society, macro-actors that naturally dominate the scene... The problem is that these entities could not exist at all without the construction of long networks in which numerous faithful records circulate in both directions, records which are, in turn, summarized and displayed to convince.
- Julian Assange, ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’, iq.org, November 10, 2006.Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behaviour as conspiratorial.
Recordkeeping and power are inextricably bound together. The act of making a record and how it is kept can shape the current and future reality for an individual or group - in some cases to oppress or control, in some to liberate. This was strikingly evident in the stories emerging from WikiLeaks’ latest batches of cable releases where they touched on recordkeeping and archives.
Here are nation states choosing to open or restore the archive in pursuit of more open societies, while others seek to close or corrupt it - their actions correlating closely with the extent to which they exert oppressive and unjust power over the citizenry. We see these macro-actors using Latour’s ‘long networks’ of recordkeeping to propagandise their oppressive practices, or indeed to strike agreements with other states or the remnants of former police or security organisations on the management and protection of records and archives, in pursuit of Assange’s concept of concealed, conspiratorial plans. Here are a few examples.
Historical revisionism
05YEREVAN769 (Armenia)
Released: 26/08/2011
“The Turkish Parliament held hearings in mid-April on the Armenian issue and issued a
statement not only confirming their own revisionist efforts, but also blatantly calling on third
countries (such as the UK) to revisit, review and revise their own archives.”
10ASHGABAT132 (Turkmenistan)
Released: 26/08/2011
“During the era of Perestroika in the late 1980s, Turkmenistan's Archives published material from 19th century police records that showed, for example, that Ashgabat was a multi-ethnic city. Soon after independence, the Turkmen Government stopped publishing this material, probably because it did not support the government's ideas about Turkmen national identity.”
Intimidation against the opening of archives of reconciliation and restitution
04BRATISLAVA300(Slovakia)
Released: 26/08/2011
“On the night of March 23, Jan Langos, the head of the Institute of the Memory of the Nation and former Czechoslovak interior minister, was attacked by three apparently well-trained, muscular men. The group knocked Langos down and beat him seriously... The IMN's role is to collect, maintain and open the intelligence archives from the Nazi and Communist era (1939-89), to prosecute Nazi and Communist crimes, as well as crimes against peace, human dignity and war crimes, including all forms of politically-based repression... Parliament elected Langos Chairman of the Institute Board in April 2003. The day before the vote, Langos' wife Gabriela was beaten and seriously injured in Prague, where she resides... Although the above incidents might be construed as random acts of violence, they bear the unmistakable hallmark of the former Communist Intelligence Service.”
Information sharing without accountability
08ISTANBUL439
Released: 26/06/2011
“Iranian President Ahmadinejad led an Iranian delegation to Istanbul August 14-15 for a bilateral "working visit." Five agreements - on security cooperation, the environment, transportation, tourism, and archives - were signed.”
Opening of the archives prevented by vested interests at highest level of government
06TIRANA506 (Albania)
Released: 26/08/2011
“The government is unlikely to engage in the thorough unearthing of facts and data that would be necessary for truly bringing to light the full damage caused by Communism. Such analysis would require an opening of State archives which heretofore have remained sealed and few doubt will ever come to pass given the prominence of many former Communists, including the current PM, throughout the political class. This is not a new issue nor is it likely to be resolved any time soon.”
In 2010 the International Council on Archives issued a Universal Declaration on Archives. It confirms “the vital necessity of archives for supporting business efficiency, accountability and transparency, for protecting citizens rights, for establishing individual and collective memory, for understanding the past, and for documenting the present to guide future actions.” It further “identifies one of the vital roles of archivists as making these records available for use, and pledges that archivists will work together in order that archives are made accessible to everyone, while respecting the pertinent laws and the rights of individuals, creators, owners and users.”
If this and other statements from the archives profession are more than lip service then surely these and other abuses of the archival process deserve our attention.
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Archives or secrets, they are often the same.
As discussed earlier, comprehensive archives are a wonderful tool, but only if they can be accessed by all those people who need them. If access to archival material can be restricted to certain groups or individuals, then they may become a weapon. This weaponized characteristic can be in the form of selective releases or of denial of supportive information.
Using the excuse of maintaining secrecy for security or protective reasons opens the door to a multitude of abuses, and supplies a ready justification for any action concerning the archive. In short the keeping of secrets is always for the purpose of maintaining the power or advantage over those who are not privy to those secret informations. Keeping secrets, presupposes a right and moral obligation to make decisions for other people. Often the keeping of secrets is couched in very benevolent and proprietary terms, but the entire concept is open to subjective bias and distortion. Who is truly fit to decide whether people are fit for knowledge and who can calculate the future effects of disclosure. Archives which are not freely accessible can never be considered a public asset.
Using the tactic of delayed or progressive release of archival material is equally bad. An obvious example is the Canada/US Free trade agreement. The Prime Minister of Canada assumed the authority to negotiate this agreement in secret from the Canadian people, and then sealed access to the text and many of the details, for twenty years. What sort of Democracy does that represent? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_%E2%80%93_United_States_Free_Trade_A...
We have recently seen some of the effects of that agreement in the skewed and hamstrung application in the energy sector. Even three years beyond that twenty year black-out, the agreement is still not available to the people of Canada????
Secret archives do nothing to promote Democracy and Equality among citizens of a nation. There will always be those people who, through economic or political power, will have access to the archive, and human nature will lead them to take advantage of the information available. Those people who by accident or employment gain access to archival material which is detrimental to the leaders, and or, beneficial to the public, and are motivated to disclose that information to the public, those who we now call “whistle blowers”, are always punished. http://freecanada.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/canadas-dirty-little-secret/
While as was also the case for Bradley Manning, those whose crimes and misdeeds were exposed, often receive little or no punishment. Given the unequal distribution of power, no Archive can be considered in the public interest unless there is universal access. No secret records can be considered justified because of a lack of qualified and objective oversight.
WikiLeaks somewhat overcame the distribution problem by allowing many mirrors sites to carry the same information. This is a beginning, but not the entire solution. Free access to the WikiLeaks documents is still subject to and dependant upon access to the internet. That is not something any of us can afford to take for granted. Hopefully mankind’s future holds the possibility of wide distribution of so much computational power, that anyone can access any information they seek. Common people have very little privacy in our World. Why should secrecy and privacy be afforded to governments and an elite group of people. There is no evidence that secrecy has benefited anyone other than those who keep the secrets.
Cass: this part in effects negates the intent
>>"...accessible to everyone, while respecting the pertinent laws and the rights of individuals, creators, owners and users.”<<
It all comes back to which side one's bread is buttered on. This declaration makes the rest of the statement meaningless. Unless all data is uploaded to a public database immediatly, any government seeking to deny access simply passes the appropriate law. And who are the "Owners" of an archive? Is it the government department, the government of the day, or the people of the nation or group that actually paid for it? Normally groups are structured so that the decision makers are not those who ultimately pay for the services. This upside down structure is common because the leaders goals are to benifit from association, not to pay for it.