The Transparent Dictator paradox and how justice complements transparency

Cory Doctorow’s latest Guardian column warns that transparency is useless unless it comes together with justice:

Transparency means nothing unless it is accompanied by the rule of law. It means nothing unless it is set in a system of good and responsible government, of oversight of authority that expeditiously and effectively handles citizen complaints. Transparency means nothing without justice.

….

Transparency on its own is nothing more than spectacle: it’s just another season of Big Brother in which all the contestants are revealed, over and over again, as thugs. Transparency on its own robs as much hope as it delivers, because transparency without justice is a perennial reminder that the game is rigged and that those in power govern for power’s sake, not for justice.

I’ve been making a similar point about why most online transparency projects in authoritarian states are useless: with or without transparency, many citizens are usually aware of acts of corruption and violence that are taking place – but their ability to act on that information – short of rebellion – is very limited and they do not have much moving space to act on all the injustices around them.

I believe that the usefulness of online transparency projects tends to increase if they are deployed in more democratic societies. This is what I call the Transparent Dictator paradox: countries that need democratic change the most are usually the ones that stand to benefit  from Internet-driven transparency projects the least. It works the other way around too: the governments of the United States or the United Kingdom might be the easiest ones to make totally transparent, but they would not probably top any global agenda of places that need transparency and democracy the most. 

Cory, however, points to the lack of any reasonable state reaction to the much-discussed police violence at last year’s Climate Camp as an example of how transparency alone may be insufficient even in advanced democacies like Britain’s.

But a recent meeting on police violence at Climate Camp, called by the Lib Dem MP David Howarth, illustrates just how woefully inadequate transparency on its own is at checking the abuse of authority. Howarth’s presentation – which included a short video comprising footage from the BBC, Sky news, and many citizen journalists’ cameras – showed how the extraordinary police presence at last summer’s Climate Camp near Kingsnorth power station in Kent led to a series of abuses of power.

The video showed police harassment of journalists, beatings dealt to unresisting peaceful protesters, humiliating and unwarranted search procedures, unjustifiable seizure of personal property, and so on. The police – 1,400 officers from 26 forces – justified all this force by characterising the Climate Campers as violent rioters, noting that 70 police officers had been injured while on duty at the event (it was subsequently revealed that the officers were "injured" by sunstroke, insect bites, etc – no injuries are attributed to scuffles with the protesters).

And here’s where transparency breaks down. We’ve known about all this since last August – seven months and more. It was on national news. It was on the web. Anyone who cared about the issue knew everything they needed to know about it. And everyone had the opportunity to find out about it: remember, it was included in national news broadcasts, covered in the major papers – it was everywhere.

And yet … nothing much has happened in the intervening eight months. Simply knowing that the police misbehaved does nothing to bring them to account.

On reading this column, I began thinking about a very subtle relationship between our increasing capacity to publicize official misbehavior and our (seemingly) decreasing capacity to take the same officials to task. Could it be that the online virality of policy brutality videos like the one described by Cory creates an illusion that justice is already being served merely by the fact that they are being put on YouTube?

In other words, are we less likely to take action – ring and complain to our MP, for example – simply because we know that policemen would be put to shame by millions of YouTube users anyway? If so, this could be a very dangerous trade-off to make: online public shaming is no good substitute for the just punishments prescribed by the law.