1. Good Gossip, and No Harm Done to U.S.
By ALBERT R. HUNT | BLOOMBERG NEWS
Published: December 5, 2010
WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks is one of those stories where the passions of the moment blind us to
what may eventually be seen as the more important lessons.
Ever since The New York Times, The Guardian and three other European publications began to publish
the secret U.S. State Department and Pentagon documents, obtained by the WikiLeaks Web site, the
conversation has focused on how embarrassing this is for the U.S. government and others around the
world; whether WikiLeaks’ erratic founder, Julian Assange, should be put on a terrorist list and
prosecuted; and did the news media, especially The New York Times, act responsibly in publishing the
material?
To be sure, there are embarrassing revelations in the thousands of cables, often raw files. Arab
governments are urging the United States to strike Iran; the United States and South Korea are gaming
China’s reaction to a collapse of North Korea; the portraits of heads of state aren’t flattering.
This no doubt will complicate some relations as well as American diplomacy for a while. Despots
probably will go out of their way to distance themselves publicly.
Still, rather than exposing ineptitude, a reading of a fair portion of the documents suggests that they
actually reflect well on U.S. policy and diplomacy. Pressure to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear
weapons isn’t effective if China, which gets much of its oil from that country, is opposed. U.S. efforts
to cut a deal with the Saudis, who fear Iran, to possibly supply more oil to China come across as
shrewd.
Most of the cables, along with the good gossip, reflect similar professionalism, probably to the
consternation of the WikiLeaks crowd.
Take a moment to think over the sensitive U.S. diplomatic and military documents that could have been
revealed over the past half-century. There would have been reports of attempted assassinations, bribes
and the procurement of prostitutes for foreign leaders, or the illegal use of torture.
This isn’t to characterize the motives of WikiLeaks and its publicity-seeking founder, Mr. Assange,
who said his purpose was to humiliate the U.S. government. Beyond the predictable reactions both
inside and outside the Obama administration, the actual effect may have been best captured by Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, who suggested that while the cables were “awkward” and “embarrassing,” the
consequences for U.S. foreign policy are “fairly modest.”
In this light, the analogy to the 1971 Pentagon Papers, which exposed the internal deliberations of
Vietnam War decision-making, appears strained. Those documents chronicled years of deliberate lies
and misrepresentations that caused a debacle resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
There’s nothing comparable in the WikiLeaks.
On the other hand, the “transparency is always good” defense is flawed, too.
The result, short-term at least, will be to discourage candor in cables, just as the immediate aftermath of
kiss-and-tell books is to discourage dialogue.

2. It is worth considering this when measuring the cries to lynch Mr. Assange. Mike Huckabee, a
Republican presidential hopeful, wants him executed; others want to lock him up at Guantánamo Bay.
His actions may be offensive; it’s not clear they’re prosecutable under the almost century-old
Espionage Act.
Facing potential legal obstacles, some politicians now say the law ought to be rewritten to make it
easier to go after people like Mr. Assange.
Rather than doing anything that smacks of tinkering with the First Amendment, it may be better to
leave Mr. Assange to the mercy of the Swedes, who have issued a warrant for his arrest for alleged sex
crimes.
The swirl of controversy, of course, has gone far beyond Mr. Assange. The former Republican vice
presidential candidate Sarah Palin blasted the Obama administration for its “incompetent” handling of
the affair.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela joined Mr. Assange in calling for the resignation of Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and others charged that
The New York Times acted irresponsibly, if not unpatriotically, in publishing these stories. (The paper
got the information, not from WikiLeaks, but from The Guardian, which wanted to share the
disclosures with America’s most prestigious newspaper.)
To step aside from the political disputes, there are other considerations. A reading of The New York
Times’ handling of the leaks suggests that it published and redacted responsibly. Mrs. Clinton is widely
judged to have reacted sensibly, in public and in private, as she traveled to Central Asia and the Middle
East on a long-planned trip that brought her face to face with some of the leaders described in the
leaked cables.
As for security, experts like Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
cybersecurity expert and former State Department official, say the Obama administration actually has
been more aggressive than its predecessor on these sorts of security issues.
There are lessons: The original source apparently was a U.S. Army private, one of about a million
people with “top secret” security clearance in America. (The material in the latest WikiLeaks dump was
rated at the lower “secret” level, and was accessible to about three million people.) That process plainly
has to be reviewed. John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a public policy organization focused on national
security, says, “If you can get a credit card, you can get a ‘secret’ clearance.”
Further, as Mr. Lewis says: “After 9/11, we realized that information sharing was important, that
having pieces in different databases had drawbacks. We fixed that, but not the technologies and
controls that manage the risk of greater access.”
One risk now is that the leaks will stifle information sharing between U.S. agencies and with other
countries.
Even if digital security is improved — for instance by creating new controls and clearances —
preserving an open society in the Internet age means that governments, corporations and individuals
will periodically have to deal with these cyber intrusions. Some may be more damaging than the
WikiLeaks incidents.