Rohan Silva: The internet has increased information leaks and transparency

Data dump: Edward Snowden leaked huge amounts of information

Reuters

11 April 2016

Back in 2009, the world was a more innocent place, somehow. Isis was a river in Oxford. Tinder was a twinkle in a right-swiper’s eye. And Donald Trump was just another reality TV star.

Then in May of that year, the Daily Telegraph published a huge trove of MPs’ expense claims, obtained from leaked computer disks. The impact was immediate, and incredible.

Six government ministers resigned. Four MPs ended up in prison. Dozens more decided not to stand for re-election. The entire expenses system was overhauled. Perhaps most significantly of all, trust in politicians fell even further, with consequences that are still being felt today. Indeed, a recent survey commissioned by this newspaper found that three-quarters of Londoners still think MPs haven’t done enough to clean up politics since the expenses scandal.

Fast forward to 2016 and the idea that a data leak might spark big political and social changes is hardly a surprise. We’ve got used to previously secretive institutions being hit by data breaches, including intelligence agencies (via Edward Snowden), diplomats (Wiki-Leaks), corporations (Sony, etc) — and now financial services, thanks to the so-called Panama Papers released to the world last week.

If you take a step back, you see how with each of these examples (and others), the internet is dissolving many of the traditional information asymmetries that used to exist in our society. We used to take it for granted that governments had access to lots of information that we’d never see — and it was the same for other powerful institutions.

Thanks to the internet, massive amounts of information can be shared instantly, free of charge, and it’s having a profound effect. And of course, digital technology is becoming more advanced all the time. The amount of data released in the Panama Papers leak was more than 1,000 times larger than the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables in 2010, and included around 10 million documents.

Fifty years ago it would be almost unimaginable to be able to leak this much information — it’d take a ship to ferry the information away from Panama. Today, all it takes is a single encrypted email.

Throughout history we see how significant reductions in the cost and effort of communicating information led to seismic shifts in the world around us. The printing press played a central role in the Reformation, while radio and television helped shape the 20th century. The internet is no less significant, which is why I’m so fascinated by it — especially the impact it’s having on our economy, society and culture, in ways that we may not fully understand for decades to come.

But in the meantime, how should we operate in this brave new world of transparency? When the MPs’ expenses scandal broke in 2009, a decision was taken to require all Tory MPs to start publishing their expenses online, and in real time. MPs behaved very differently when they knew their expenses were being scrutinised in detail, which meant a better deal for taxpayers.

Embracing transparency like this is the only option at a time when the internet is reshaping our institutions, and giving us all access to more information than entire governments possessed just a few decades ago. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and there’s no going back.

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Rohan Silva

Rohan Silva: The internet has increased information leaks and transparency

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