The Wikileaks disclosures, revisited

The other day I mentioned my uneasiness with Wikileaks' disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables.

I don't see much good coming from the Wikileaks disclosures. I certainly don't see the good outweighing the harm, at least to the U.S.

Those statements need revisiting.

First, "the Wikileaks disclosures" makes it sound like Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, themselves were primarily responsible for obtaining the information. They weren't, of course: the information apparently was obtained by a comparative nobody in the U.S. government. However, as a correspondent for The Economist points out, a disturbing number of people, including Sen. Joe Lieberman, have decided that hounding Wikileaks is the proper approach to dealing with the disclosures it facilitates. (Lieberman got Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks following publication of the cables.) It should be obvious by now that such a strategy is futile: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

With or without WikiLeaks, the personel [sic], technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public. Jailing Thomas Edison in 1890 would not have darkened the night.

Lieberman's actions, by the way, should surprise no one: he has an authoritarian streak a mile wide and loves the national security state.

The other matter I've reexamined is what "good" will or won't arise from the publication of these cables. I maintain that foreign officials will be less inclined to share information on a confidential or unofficial basis because they will not wish to be embarrassed by future leaks (which, frankly, I regard as inevitable). The ability of U.S. foreign service personnel to gather information thus will be reduced, and I can only see that as a blow to U.S. foreign policy as a whole.

On the other hand, the aforelinked Salon piece by Glenn Greenwald makes an excellent point:

Note that Lieberman here is desperate to prevent American citizens -- not The Terrorists -- from reading the WikiLeaks documents which shed light on what the U.S. Government is doing. His concern is domestic consumption.

(Emphasis is in the original text.)

If the rest of the world can see the documents, why stop U.S. citizens? Greenwald found nine facts he claimed had not been reported by The Washington Post, clearly implying that more nuggets unknown to the U.S. public were to be found among the leaked documents.

That brings us back to the "good" that leaking these documents might accomplish. From a foreign policy standpoint, I see none, but from a domestic standpoint, who can tell? Will U.S. citizens learn things they should know about their government?

(Thanks to Daring Fireball for the links that inspired this reconsideration.)