It seems as though everyone is talking about this new WikiLeaks story, so I figured that I should put my two cents into the pot. Perhaps this is a bit hypocritical of me, since I am writing about it here, but the more I hear about WikiLeaks, the more I tire of it. The New York Times seems to be doing nothing but running story after story on the diplomatic communiques, and NPR has been wringing their hands for the last few days about it. Frankly, all of these “huge allegations” are pretty standard knowledge to anyone who has ever studied international relations or diplomacy. Obtaining intelligence on foreign leaders and officials, even seemingly unimportant and irrelevant data, is, and should be, standard procedure. In addition, secret diplomatic communication is something that is protected by treaty agreements between almost every nation that has diplomatic relations with another. It’s hardly the big bombshell that it’s being made out to be by every media outlet.
The details of the communications are the only thing new in these, and it’s nothing even that surprising. It’s more of a curiosity than anything, albeit one that can place sources of intelligence at very serious risk. I have to wonder if WikiLeaks has no real concept of what they’re doing, or the danger that releasing this can pose to individuals’ lives for no real value. They claim to want to protect individuals, but their redaction efforts are amateur at best, and do very little to protect the sources of this intelligence.
In my opinion, it’s quite obvious that this is nothing more than a political smear campaign against the US for doing the exact same thing that everyone does, and that the US must do to stay on the same level diplomatically as other nations. If they were really interested in changing the world and making diplomatic interaction more overt, then they would have done something other than point this big digital finger at one country and cry foul. As if making diplomatic interaction more over was necessarily even a good thing.
It does show that we need to be much more careful in how we handle high level sensitive intelligence, though. It appears as though many people handling this intelligence are junior enlisted members of the military that have little or no education in such matters, experience in handling it, or the knowledge or respect of its importance. Is this a deeper problem in our military, giving individuals too much access to too much information at too low of a pay grade? Or is it cultural? I’m not sure. Whatever the cause though, it must be remedied and it must be remedied quickly, otherwise people may die because of this information being leaked to irresponsible muckrakers like Julian Assange.
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