Information may or may not want to be free, but digital information certainly wants to be copied. The ease with which copies are made online isn't just a problem for folks trying to make money on information, it's also a problem for any group that's trying to hold an online discussion in secret—terrorists, pedophiles, pirates, or, in this case, the American Psychological Association. Some prominent members of the latter group are probably none too pleased that an archive of their discussions with military psychologists on the subject of military interrogations is now in the public domain.

Off-the-record mailing lists are a standard but rarely-scrutinized feature of journalism and politics in the online era, but these are two groups for whom off-the-record conversations are like oxygen. Even in the event of a leak, the damage to most of the participants would likely be minimal, since the members of such lists all know how the off-the-record game works (i.e., you still have to watch what you say, because you could well be outed eventually).

But when secret e-mail lists get used by members of other professions, especially guilds where members are accustomed to communicating confidentially with their peers absent any regard for the concept of "plausible deniability," a leak can make things really complicated for list members. Witness the invitation-only e-mail discussion list created by the American Psychological Association and the Pentagon in order to host a dialogue between military and civilian psychologists on the profession's role in the interrogation side of the war on terror. The APA probably didn't expect the entire list archive [PDF] would ever get leaked to the press and follow its members around on Google for the rest of their careers. But that's exactly what happened.

ProPublica and Salon published the archive of the mailing list, which was for the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) group in the APA, and the 219-page PDF is quite a read. Some of the participants are military psychologists, at least one of whom was assigned to Abu Ghraib in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal, and some are civilians who specialize in psychological ethics. All of them, though, are concerned with defining the APA's official stance on psychologists' participation in military interrogations, especially when those interrogations involve torture (i.e., waterboarding, stress positions, isolation, and various forms of psychological abuse).

The eventual product of the list-based discussion, as well as closed-door, offline meetings among the members, was a controversial report that split the APA and pitted many of its members against the organization's president, Gerry Koocher, who was accused by many members of being soft on torture.

Interestingly, it turns out that Dr. Koocher was addicted to the TV show 24 while he was working with the other PENS members on putting together the report. How do I know that? Because he says so in the list archives. His 24 addiction (the first few seasons were indeed pretty great) is one of the many items that the Chief of Psychology at Boston's Children's Hospital and specialist in psychological ethics would probably have preferred to keep confined to the list.

I've no doubt that the APA members who strenuously objected to the original PENS report on the grounds that its condemnation of any and all psychologist involvement in interrogation wasn't clear enough or strong enough will read through Koocher's e-mails with great interest. And I'm also sure that the APA in general has learned a painful lesson of the Internet age: if you want to keep it secret, don't hit "send."

Listing image by Wikipedia