MISCELLANEOUS ORIGINS

Articles cited diverse leaked and hacked sources: corporate and governmental, US and foreign, military and civilian, domestic and diplomatic. Corporations include Stratfor, DynCorp, Blackwater, and multinationals doing business in Luxembourg. Documents appear from the governments of India and France, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, and the International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan). Several US agencies are included: US Trade Representative, US military video footage from Iraq, Joint Task Force-Guantánamo documents, the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs,” Congressional Research Service reports, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, State Department incident reports from Iraq, Coalition Provisional Authority files, and Navy and CIA memoranda. Articles using leaks indirectly (code-2) suggest additional sources from China, Britain, Albania, Venezuela, the “Palestine Papers” and “tunileaks,” alleged US intelligence files leaked by Edward Snowden, and John Podesta’s emails.

Deciding what sources are fair game and which are off-limits for analysts is not a one-time problem from the Manning disclosures. However, more than three-quarters of peer-reviewed code-3 articles (64/81) apparently employed at least one leaked US diplomatic cable; comparing these articles yields insights on how scholars addressed the dilemmas of leaked sources.

FEW SOURCES

Of the 60 peer-reviewed articles referencing identifiable cables (disregarding two with specific cables only in appendices and two with cables not individually listed), half (30) cited a single cable, another eighth (8 articles) only two, and just a third (22, 37%) cited three or more (Figure 2). The top quintile (12/60) cited more cables than the rest combined. Published references may not reflect the extent of research conducted, though. Nor does citation quantity alone indicate analytical quality: specific projects or inferences might obtain great value from a single document (Bennett and Checkel Reference Bennett and Checkel2015, 16–8).

Figure 2.

Articles Using Leaked Cables

However, readers need to know how and why authors approached a quarter-million cables, only to extract isolated citations. Further, given leaked documents’ ethical concerns, scholars should consider whether they could perform substantially the same analysis without touching leaked sources at all. If this sparse evidence is unavailable elsewhere, and crucial for authors’ analysis, that should be clearly indicated. Without clear methodological rationales, I find perplexing the frequency of uncritical reliance on solitary documents from a voluminous and problematic corpus.

INCOMPLETE DISCLOSURES

In most cases (37/64 articles, 58%), readers would have no idea that leaked sources were used or WikiLeaks accessed, without checking notes, references, or appendices. Placing source and inference discussion in footnotes is often reasonable, especially to maintain case-study narratives. However, if authors engage sensitive or illegal material, prominent disclosure and discussion in body text would help. Moreover, when articles mention using archival sources, government documents, or diplomatic cables but do not clarify that these included leaks, then stated research methods are misleading.

Similarly, only one-fifth of articles (13/64), even in footnotes or appendices, mentioned document classification (yet apparently cited classified material anyway); eighty percent cited similar documents either without recognizing, or acknowledging, that status. And, disregarding mentions of “WikiLeaks,” just one-third (21/64) noted their sources’ leaked nature. Four articles, to their credit, acknowledged both leaked and classified aspects; thirty-four (53%) did neither. Neglect of document classification or leaks suggests incomplete understanding or analysis of source material, undermining empirical persuasiveness; conversely, disclosure of classified and unauthorized sources highlights the work’s potential ethical precarity, requiring further authorial justification. (Intentional obscuring of source provenance would exacerbate both methodological and ethical problems.)

RARE RATIONALES

Why did scholars employ leaked material, and how did they address concerns about document legitimacy or reliability? Among 22 peer-reviewed articles citing three or more leaked cables, where WikiLeaks was evidently part of the research strategy, explicit methodological discussion of leaked documents’ prospective empirical utility or limitations is sparse. Only one article extensively addresses document reliability: Elias (Reference Elias2018, 24–44) triangulates between leaked and public sources, considers what information might remain classified, and argues, “it is reasonable to expect the Wikileaks records to be representative of” the “diplomatic processes” the article investigates. Predominantly, though, articles citing leaked cables apparently treated them as straightforward reflections of US policy or host country conditions.

Moreover, none of the 64 peer-reviewed articles employing leaked cables expressed ethical reservations, provided normative justifications, or mentioned potential illegality. Many scholars may not be contemplating sources’ context and consequences or not disclosing this. Selection bias could be involved if researchers with ethical concerns simply avoid leaks. However, even authors without such qualms ought to defend their research strategies.

Some articles citing leaked documents other than cables provided clearer ethical position taking. One analyzes videos purportedly documenting human-rights violations by US forces in Iraq (Tidy Reference Tidy2017); leaks show “how dominant accounts of war can be complicated and contested” and how multiple perspectives are “called upon as legitimate conduits for truths about war and are variously written into or out of accounts of war” (96–7). Further, Tidy (Reference Tidy2017, 96–8, 102–5) critiques WikiLeaks’ video editing and other source interventions, to resist taking official US stories or WikiLeaks counternarratives at face value. Another assembles data from leaked Joint Task Force-Guantánamo documents regarding detainees (Deutschmann Reference Deutschmann2016), declaring an “urgent need” for research on “prisoner treatment” and the consequences of prisoners’ behavior for “how US authorities react.” A third uses US Trade Representative documents on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to analyze normative aspects of interest representation (Kuyper Reference Kuyper2016), claiming that “interest in exclusion … by governments and bureaucrats,” with information such as treaty drafts “deliberately obscured from public view … violates standards of inclusive democracy” (318).

Notably, these rationales involve human rights and democracy, emphasizing governmental conduct rather than just documentary content. I am unconvinced that normative adherence to democratic deliberation and government transparency necessarily legitimizes scholarship with leaked classified materials or that the objective of improving human rights practices justifies any means of access to evidence. However, explicit authorial reflexivity facilitates more productive ethical debates than citations without such context.

LEGITIMIZING EUPHEMISMS

Further complicating source assessment is what I see as legitimizing euphemisms, in 39% of articles (25/64). One-quarter (16/64) included positive verbs identifying WikiLeaks’ connection to the cables (e.g., published, released) or adjectives about those documents’ status other than classified and leaked (e.g., internal, private). These claims are accurate, particularly alongside admission of documents’ unauthorized disclosure; besides, journals may influence citation phrasing. However, such diction suggests contestable claims about provenance and WikiLeaks’ legitimacy. Distribution is not declassification, and availability is not authorization.

More problematic are references to “WikiLeaks cables,” which almost one-fifth of articles made (12/64), implying ownership or authorship, neither of which is true. This shorthand blurs the origin and disclosure of these sources and complicates scholars’ ability to use them as evidence. The variation or omission of labels and what I read as hesitation or ambivalence about these documents’ acquisition suggests that researchers are tiptoeing around the provenance problem rather than confronting it directly.

DATA RICHNESS

There is certainly a case for the evidentiary value of leaked documents. Focusing on originally classified material related to policy making reflects existing qualitative research methods guidance on process tracing, archives, and case studies, which emphasizes obtaining the best available evidence (Bennett and Checkel Reference Bennett and Checkel2015, 18–9, 25–7; Darnton Reference Darnton2018, 18, 92–3, 110–6; George and Bennett Reference George and Bennett2005, 96–107; Trachtenberg Reference Trachtenberg2006, 140–2, 153–7). Important channels for declassification and document release include the Foreign Relations of the United States series, mandatory declassification review by National Archives staff, and FOIA requests by researchers or institutions such as the National Security Archive (consult Brandon Rottinghaus in Frisch et al. Reference Frisch, Harris, Kelly and Parker2012; Trachtenberg Reference Trachtenberg2006, 252–5). Vast repositories of declassified sources now reside online on governmental and nongovernmental sites (see Connelly et al. Reference Connelly, Hicks, Jervis, Spirling and Suong2020). WikiLeaks might appear to offer yet another collection of government documents, easily accessible and temptingly recent.

However, just on empirical grounds, even authentic and comprehensive tranches of leaked documents present concerns. First, analysts must be careful not to read too much into individual sources, as classification implies neither accuracy nor authoritativeness and memorandum authors are not omniscient or objective. As retired diplomat Peter Galbraith (Reference Galbraith2011) explains, cables are crafted to command scarce attention at the State Department and perhaps the White House—salacious details, jokes, criticism of host-government officials, and narrative style are in, while truly sensitive matters are kept out. Is an exposé of foreign corruption factual, does it reflect embassy or US government positions, or is it rhetorically designed to focus attention on actionable problems? Moreover, documents’ original classification may have talismanic appeal for researchers: the higher the better, with greater implied authority. These risks obtain with declassified documents too—but in archives, scholars can cross-reference and contextualize arrays of contemporaneous sources.

Second, those documents comprise better evidence for some questions than do others. Embassy cables, for instance, are not a clear window into either US policy making or political developments in host countries. If leaked documents comprise one type or series (outgoing cables, without internal memoranda or instructions), from one bureaucratic organization (State Department), scholars obtain a very partial picture of policy processes and perceptions. Thus, Robert Jervis (Reference Jervis2015) critiques studies of torture and harsh interrogations based on CIA cables both for overreliance on a single source and because much of the debate took place orally and never made it into the files. Similarly, Bob Woodward argues, WikiLeaks “has been really overblown. Those documents are midlevel classification. They have virtually no standing in the White House, where decisions are made” (Glasser Reference Glasser2011). Importantly, if scholars rationalize using leaked documents because of low-level classification, then their sources do not reflect high-level decision making. Further, focusing on one classification level might bias the sample, as officials express different observations in different settings.

Last, given legal and ethical concerns with leaked documents, researchers analyzing such evidence should explain why alternative sources are insufficient. Scholars might argue that topics such as covert operations or ongoing trade negotiations have no methodological alternative to these materials. However, open sources can yield major insights even on sensitive subjects like targeted killings via drone strikes (Banka and Quinn Reference Banka and Quinn2018). And regarding host-country political and social conditions, diplomats’ classified reports are not necessarily more accurate than, and frequently rely on, local media. Richness is relative: the empirical value of particular leaked materials for specific research questions needs to be argued, not just assumed.

DATA RELIABILITY

Provenance concerns not just theft, but fraud. First, outright fabrication or manipulation of texts is worrisome with electronic leaks, though unlikely in official archives (Trachtenberg Reference Trachtenberg2006, 146–7). Verification is challenging because government officials are instructed not to confirm or deny leaked information. In the antiquities world, objects are often brokered by financially motivated, opaque entities, with rampant potential for forgery. Traffickers in looted goods are often willing to sell fraudulent ones; scrupulous collectors need consistently clean hands on both issues to preserve their reputations.

Second, even if individual documents are intact, selection effects are significant. If analysts do not know what was inaccessible to leakers or not released by them (or by intermediaries such as WikiLeaks or newspapers), this skews inferences from the publicly available sample (see Gill and Spirling Reference Gill and Spirling2015). For instance, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, he withheld volumes on US-North Vietnamese peace talks and kept back, for decades, other classified material he had illicitly photocopied at the same time (National Archives 2011; Savage Reference Savage2021).

Leak motivations matter, and WikiLeaks is an especially suspect source. As Michael Walzer (Reference Walzer2018, 58) argues, “In contrast to newspapers with long records of public service, WikiLeaks is the wrong kind of intermediary between a whistleblower and the American people,” with “narrowly partisan and personal aims.” One study suggested that less than 10% of the site’s documents came from leakers or whistleblowers, almost 70% from hackers, and the remainder from open sources and FOIA requests—and that WikiLeaks withheld Trump-related documents while releasing Clinton material (Dorfman Reference Dorfman2018). As unauthorized sources’ authenticity and representativeness depends on the choices and goals of leakers, hackers, and intermediaries, researchers must consider not only empirical problems with the texts themselves but also the ethical baggage they carry. Ultimately, even reliable and useful data might not be worth employing.

LEGALITY

Determining how to analyze leaked documents is secondary: the fundamental problem is whether to engage them at all. The US government’s position on unauthorized disclosures is an important reference point: Manning was convicted (and Assange indicted) of violating the Espionage Act—disclosing classified information without authorization makes one not simply a leaker but a spy. It is unclear, even if reading leaked material does not constitute disclosure, whether publication of excerpts or information from those documents does: Espionage Act provisions, construed broadly, could encompass distribution (18 USC 37, §793, 798, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-37). Consequences are more likely and more extensive—including loss of employment or security clearances—for government officials and contractors, including those in academic or research positions, who are explicitly reminded not to engage this material. One Foreign Policy commentator refers to post-WikiLeaks surveillance of federal employees as potential leakers or insider threats, by their peers and supervisors, as “Orwellian” and an “inquisition” (Bamford Reference Bamford2016). This may be hyperbolic, but it is not hypothetical.

Formal liability may be lower for others. As private citizens, some scholars might see using publicly available material as minor, low-risk violations, akin to jaywalking or violating broadcast-television copyright notices. Society routinely distinguishes between johns and pimps, narcotics possession and distribution, and downloading music for personal use and operating file-sharing servers—although participating in such markets entails complicity with suppliers. And national laws vary: authors and journals outside the United States might not worry about legal consequences from Manning’s leaked documents.

The ethics consideration, though, is not just whether research carries prosecutable consequences but whether scholars should knowingly exploit and endorse illegally obtained material or scrupulously avoid it. Whether documents are governmental, corporate, or personal, leaks and hacks generally mean dealing with stolen goods (see journalist Neil Sheehan’s recalled exchange, posthumously published, with Ellsberg about the Pentagon Papers; Scott Reference Scott2021). This requires considering not just researchers’ home-country laws but also the context of documents’ authorship, ownership, and disclosure. A global discipline should advance global and reciprocal standards. APSA (2020, 17–8; likewise Boustead and Herr Reference Boustead and Herr2020, 508) guidelines permit research to cross legal lines, given sufficient justification, so legal concerns are not automatically paramount. However, they should be significant ethical considerations regarding leaked sources.

Hopefully no scholar would contemplate, as a research strategy, hacking into government systems to obtain classified documents. Why, then, are so many researchers apparently comfortable citing unauthorized material provided someone else stole it in the first place? The analogy to burglary and receipt of stolen property is uncomfortable but not farfetched. Many colleagues, during fieldwork, have experienced contacts or friends that helpfully but unofficially proffer collections of physical or electronic documents (see Lessing and Willis Reference Lessing and Willis2019). Before accessing leaked documents online, we might ask ourselves how confidently we would carry them through a departure terminal from their country of origin. Unprecedented and unauthorized access may be exciting, but scholars should tread carefully.

NATIONAL SECURITY

Classified documents present special concerns, as leaks are not merely criminal but also harmful. U.S. presidential executive orders and Office of Management and Budget guidance unambiguously declare that leaked classified documents remain classified documents: unauthorized use and dissemination is illegal and harms national security (Lew Reference Lew2010; National Archives 2009). Classification levels define the “damage to the national security” (i.e., “harm to the national defense or foreign relations”) that “reasonably could be expected to result” from their disclosure, with Confidential signifying “damage,” Secret “serious damage,” and Top Secret “exceptionally grave damage” (National Archives 2009). Posting such material online neither constitutes, nor automatically produces, declassification (2009). Moreover, the US Government treats even some unclassified information as sensitive: Controlled Unclassified Information designations let executive agencies restrict dissemination, such as prohibiting release to foreign nationals, or identifying categories of sensitive content such as genetic, infrastructure, or nuclear information (National Archives 2019). Similarly, government employees watch for “classification by compilation”: juxtaposing specific pieces of information raises documents’ overall classification level; even some combinations of unclassified information must jointly be classified (Information Security Oversight Office 2018, 8).

There are reasons to doubt blanket assertions of national security prerogatives for controlling information access. Arguably, governments too often overclassify information and resist freedom-of-information requests (Aftergood Reference Aftergood2011; Rudenstine Reference Rudenstine2016, 308–10; Shapiro and Siegel Reference Shapiro and Siegel2010), sometimes even reclassifying previously released material. Scholars might contend that certain documents are “only” Confidential or Secret; that materials are already available, with no additional harm from further use and that others will access it anyway; and that, years after particular disclosures, security risks have evaporated. Harm and risk might be small from specialized academic work with limited readership—but this is hardly guaranteed, after publication. And as Gregory Whitfield (Reference Whitfield2019 passim, at 534) astutely observes regarding experiments, the biomedical focus of human-subjects research guidance leads political scientists to underestimate scholarly risks, particularly “diffuse and group wrongs” including “violations of legitimate authority.” Even on the Pentagon Papers, which the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against preventing newspapers from printing, the Nixon Administration presented legitimate security concerns (Rudenstine Reference Rudenstine1998, 8–9, 327–9).

Moreover, scholars are unable to determine what constitutes national security harm (even security clearances do not convey that; it rests with an Original Classification Authority), especially because research necessarily involves compilation. As we cross several documents’ wires, insightful sparks emerge—which can produce unintended consequences. Just because data are already available, scholars should not assume that prospects for additional harm have disappeared. By default, protecting national security by forgoing unauthorized information might simply be the right choice. Researchers who disagree, rather than arguing that scholarship is harmless, might consider weighing public-interest benefits against legal or security externalities.

PUBLIC INTEREST

Norms and laws sometimes conflict: limited leaks to protect human rights, correct abuses of power and secrecy, and serve the public interest may be justifiable. One might proudly risk prosecution and imprisonment, and engage with flawed intermediaries like WikiLeaks, to illuminate egregious wrongs. This reflects common public conceptions of what whistleblowers do and foundations of investigative journalism. However, the US government distinguishes between whistleblowers, whose disclosures are protected to combat waste, fraud, and abuse (Shimabukuro and Whitaker Reference Shimabukuro and Whitaker2012, 15–7), and leakers of classified material, who criminally harm national security. Debating which concept covers particular disclosures is reasonable, but we should not collapse the distinction altogether. If public benefits from particular projects drive evidentiary choices and these outweigh normative concerns about law, security, or privacy, then scholars should make this case openly.

Some might argue that uncovering government secrets is intrinsically a normative good, whereby anything that takes the national security state down a peg should be encouraged. Governments’ insistence on secrecy for themselves sounds hypocritical if they routinely compromise their citizens’ privacy and information security. Disclosures from this perspective are inevitable and desirable, and whatever emerges should become public domain, covered by academic freedom. In a 1980s hacker mantra, “information wants to be free” (Brand Reference Brand1987, 204). If researchers’ value beliefs categorically legitimize leaked material, they should disclose this vital point of reflexivity.

For many analysts, though, leaks’ context and intent matter. Even if scholars perceive some leakers as whistleblowers, that does not necessarily legitimize sources like the Cablegate tranche that are massive rather than targeted and not designed to expose particular governmental abuses—especially if documents are then used for research that is further removed from uncovering wrongdoing or achieving concrete public benefits. This is different from the Pentagon Papers case (Ellsberg Reference Ellsberg2002, 289–95) and perhaps Manning’s leak of the “war diaries.” (A more acute debate concerns leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, which apparently involved more highly classified sources, with declared public interest in revealing US domestic surveillance overreach but ultimately benefiting American adversaries including Russia and China.)

Likewise, not all research projects realistically contribute enough to the public good to outweigh ethical concerns about using leaked material. Some benefits from analyzing particular data accrue privately to researchers such as information, validation of valued arguments, and resulting professional publications. For the public, though, most research projects make incremental contributions to general knowledge. Generic claims of academic freedom do not sufficiently establish ethical foundations for research with leaked documents, which ought to clear high hurdles of real-world significance. Here, broadly positivist scholars might take cues from colleagues in critical security studies on emancipation, human rights and democracy promotion, or racial justice and gender equality (inter alia, Shepherd Reference Shepherd2013). If research has a designed purpose and benefit, that may not justify all means and methods, but it should weigh in those judgments, especially if the normative intent of the research and the motivation and scope of the leak are aligned.

POLICY RELEVANCE

Engagement with leaks complicates the pursuit of policy relevance. International relations scholarship has long maintained ambivalent relations with policy making (Avey and Desch Reference Avey and Desch2014; Nincic and Lepgold Reference Nincic and Lepgold2000), and political science with American government (Smith Reference Smith1997), and leaks may exacerbate these tensions. (Relevance is not just about policy, let alone US government policy, and may even oppose it [Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2015], so I treat public interest separately.) One might argue that using the hottest, most recent materials enhances relevance (Elias Reference Elias2018, 235). And as Stephen Walt (Reference Walt2011, 53) suggested, WikiLeaks may have “fostered greater transparency and made the marketplace of ideas somewhat more efficient” for enhancing policy debate. However, leaks can breed further information lockdowns rather than trust and sunlight. Scholars might have difficulty contributing to policy discussion after participating in, or endorsing, security breaches. It is hard to speak truth to power when shut out of certain information, but deliberation also suffers when officials with security clearances cannot listen or respond because of how researchers’ information was acquired.

However, governments often encourage research with documents wrested from their adversaries. National Archives collections contain captured state records, including more than 70,000 rolls of microfilm reproducing documents from Nazi Germany and other Axis powers (National Archives 2016). Similarly, the Iraqi Ba’ath Party files now at the Hoover Institution and the Al-Qaeda and Iraqi files that were available at the now-shuttered Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC, 2005–2010, at the National Defense University at Ft. McNair), were also products of conquest rather than consent (ABC7 2008; Cox Reference Cox2010; Gordon Reference Gordon2015). Scholars are privy to troves of Japanese and German official communications from World War II and Soviet records from the Cold War that passed through the hands of American and British intelligence agencies (Andrew and Mitrokhin Reference Andrew and Mitrokhin1999; Steil Reference Steil2013).

In this time of declared great power competition, Washington might well be interested in analyses of Chinese regime security decision making and domestic propaganda operations based on leaked or hacked documents (King, Pan, and Peters Reference King, Jennifer and Margaret2017; Nathan Reference Nathan2019). The US Government might encourage or even sponsor such research—but from an ethics standpoint, that can hardly be the end of the conversation, as original governmental authors (or their successors) might see these seizures as illegitimate. Reciprocally, leaked US documents might enable policy-relevant research from the perspective of both adversaries and allies, for instance in European journals. Relevance involves trade-offs, and decisions to exploit or forgo certain leaked files build norms about future disclosures’ legitimacy.

HUMAN SUBJECTS PROTECTION

Even robust public-interest or policy-relevant assertions for document access confront human-subjects protection rationales for keeping certain information private. Leaked documents violate basic expectations of confidentiality and consent. Government officials know that much of their work ultimately joins the public record but communicate freely and effectively in classified or restricted channels knowing that decades will pass before mandatory declassification and that earlier FOIA requests would be carefully vetted, perhaps with redactions. (Even declassified archival documents containing personal information are often off-limits to researchers.) Diplomatic cables report on bilateral relationships, including frank conversations with host-government leaders and societal informants such as dissidents or members of vulnerable groups, all of whom anticipate confidentiality. Many US cables explicitly mark named interlocutors as “strictly protect” (a handling instruction separate from classification) because of harm that disclosure could cause them. Intelligence files have further issues if information about individuals was itself gathered nonconsensually (see Subotić Reference Subotić2021). Documents taken from governments do not only affect the state or amorphous, collective national security; they can also damage real people.

Boustead and Herr (Reference Boustead and Herr2020) suggest that authors handling documentary sources apply the Belmont principles (US Department of Health 1979) that undergird human-subjects research (HSR): respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. For instance, withholding personally identifiable information by anonymizing research participants guards against risks they might face after publication. This parallels many ethnographic researchers’ resistance to inflexible transparency mandates regarding sensitive interview transcripts and field notes (Büthe and Jacobs Reference Büthe and Jacobs2015). If researchers employ leaked sources, these recommendations are valuable for harm reduction. But as Subotić (Reference Subotić2021, 343, 348–9) argues, archival researchers’ ethical obligations to other individuals’ “dignity, humanity, and voice” transcend the Belmont guidelines and should extend to research staff, deceased persons (especially victims of violence or those whose records reflect coercion), and surviving communities.

Focusing on HSR procedural safeguards is misleading. First, we may overestimate harm-reduction capacity. Anonymization is not foolproof: vast human-subjects datasets risk “reidentification” and loss of confidentiality as researchers connect the dots (Zimmer Reference Zimmer2010). Anonymizing published quotations offers little protection if underlying documents are hyperlinked or discoverable. Second, HSR’s biomedical and experimental assumptions do not capture the range of ethical concerns with leaked documents, including institutional harms (see Whitfield Reference Whitfield2019). Third, the Belmont “beneficence” principle suggests higher standards than merely to do no harm: even for minimal-risk projects, researchers should consider whether they actually provide public benefits, especially to populations being studied. Fourth, the HSR lens might downplay the disciplinary community’s oversight responsibilities, burden-shift onto IRBs, and emphasize momentary compliance and approval instead of researchers’ ongoing ethical practice (see Fujii Reference Fujii2012; Israel Reference Israel2015; Marzano Reference Marzano and Love2012, 80–1).

Finally, prioritizing safeguards during research distracts from the underlying problem of source legitimacy. Scholars must explain why consensual methods and data were insufficient and defend the public value of the research against its potential harms (see Marzano Reference Marzano and Love2012, 81–2, 87). HSR prioritizes protecting vulnerable populations, and governments are hardly weak, so power relations affect research legitimacy, and it matters whose information is being seized (82–3, 89). However, Belmont principles should cover the people entangled with governmental and corporate documents and apply, as scholarly values, across research domains. Analyzing sources taken against the will of their authors (and other participants and reported-on third parties), makes researchers complicit in violations after the fact. Even if scholars avoid new individual harms, reliance on unauthorized materials undermines the ethical principles on which human-subjects protections depend.

REFLEXIVITY

The possibility of value-neutral social science is an eternal debate, but unauthorized sources make it especially acute. Borrowing from Robert Cox (Reference Cox1981, 128), sources and methods may not be “always for someone and for some purpose,” but decisions to analyze or forgo leaked documents certainly are. There is no easy way to avoid complicity: on Cablegate, scholars’ methodological choices tacitly either support US Government efforts to keep secrets or endorse other actors’ attempts to reveal these. Scholars might not want to associate themselves broadly with the actions and objectives of any government or of nonstate hackers, leakers, and brokers like WikiLeaks. However, citation choices are weighty: sources and analyses compromise some interests and benefit others. There is moral hazard too: the values we prioritize affect scholarly norms and incentivize individual decisions. Repeatedly avoiding or downplaying these choices, affirms the positions taken most loudly or often. Political scientists need to send stronger, clearer signals about whether we will provide a market for future leaks and how scrupulously we take the provenance of our data. As interpretivist scholars argue, how we approach our sources says something about who we are, and who we are affects our research (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012, 38–40, 66–8, 95–104). Prominent, explicit reflexivity is an important criterion for establishing research legitimacy amid the challenges of leaked documents.