It’s not hard to imagine that the reactions to the next leaker will recycle those that came before them: “That wasn’t their decision to make.” But lies are conspiracy, and silence is complicity. Powers that be ask for one and demand the other, but our first duty must be to the truth. To say “Damn the lies and the liars. Damn your consequences. I know where the bodies are buried. Here lies the truth.” It may not fix the problems, but it corrects the record, giving people an honest chance at redemption and damnation.
“Who are you? What gives you the right?”
Who is anyone to demand silence and control? Who could possibly warrant that trust and authority?
You fetishize transparency and call it “radical.” You feed us convenient lies when we hunger for inconvenient truths. You whisper horrible nothings until they’re soundbites and stump speeches, and the bits of truth that survive are sanitized and devoid of context.
The terror of truth is that it is both far stranger and more mundane than the so-called “two sides to every story.” It’s that it’s neither in the middle nor bound by sides or stories. All knowledge is good knowledge; it reveals how petty factionalism is. It belongs to everyone and information to no one. But confronted with the untamed frontier and potential of cyberspace, you built walled gardens filled with paywalls and propaganda. The terror of truth is that you can’t control it, and the answer to walled gardens is to freely grow outside of them.
You say crime doesn’t pay, but when corporations make billions by breaking the law, you fine them millions. You condemn things only to copy them in secret, as if you’re afraid to be left alone on the moral high ground. You want us to think about the “big picture,” but redact the mosaic, lest we see the forest because of the trees. You begin conferences between government officers and “industry leaders” by asking journalists to leave, lest someone be there when the tree falls in the forest. You tell us “If you see something, say something” – but you want informants, not for people to be too informed about the wrong things. You long for a world of gods and monsters, because that would make you heroes.
But the good doesn’t wash out the bad, nor the bad the good. There are no heroes, there are only “bad people” doing their best, and “good people” who…aren’t. The American way was a lie imposed on the world saying the ends justified the means. But if it did, there would be little need to keep them secret. If we find a better tomorrow, it’ll be with truth and justice, not soundbites and secrets.
The leaker’s crime is having a bell you can’t unring, challenging the control secrets give you in a world that trades in those secrets. It’s knowing what you don’t want anyone to know, which you won’t ever forgive. For this, you would make Diogenes a bounty hunter and jailer. But the presence of truth is both the prompt and the prerequisite for true justice, and only that will free us.
In the end, we are better visited by any destruction wrought by truth than the false salvation found in lies. Though the liars may perish, we must let the truth be known, lest the world perish. We must tolerate no gods, no masters, no monsters, and no walls.
Damn the lies and the liars. Damn your consequences. I know where the bodies are buried. Here lies the truth.
