Transcript of 2012 Noam Chomsky interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, on Silicon Valley, the Internet, Google, #Wikileaks
▻http://chomsky.info/interviews/20120815.htm
JVDP: Do you think the hostility to Wikileaks comes from specific materials being revealed or a more general fear of new forms of communication that cannot be controlled by law or force?
NC: Its just hatred of democracy. Long before the technology revolution there was declassification of documents and I’ve spent quite a lot of time studying declassified internal documents and written a lot about them. In fact, anybody who’s worked through the declassified record can see very clearly that the reason for classification is very rarely to protect the state or the society from enemies. Most of the time it is to protect the state from its citizens, so they don’t know what the government is doing. So kind of an internal defense. Which raises a question: should we even have the classification system? Why shouldn’t these things be open? There are things you want to keep secret, like the characteristics of your latest fighter plane or something like that.
But most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won’t know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed. What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way. Say the Pentagon Papers, — that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty—five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.
Wikileaks is providing information on what ambassadors are sending to Washington and things like that. Maybe some of that has a right to some kind of secrecy, but there is a heavy burden and I think its pretty hard to meet. I haven’t read everything from Wikileaks by any means but the parts that I have read and seen I think are things the public should know.