Of Wikileaks, Secrecy, Crimes and Punishment

By Steve Hynd

Yesterday, conservative blogger Doug Ross linked to my last post on the new Wikileaks document dump, saying "the Statists can't seem to find much to criticize the despicable crackpot leaker and Julian Asshatter for". It's a bit rich, linking to a post where I was trying to set out an overview of the leaks themselves and staying entirely away from what I find to be rather tedious and circular arguments over blame and punishment among the blogeratti, but there you have it. I suppose I should write something about where I stand on the whole "Assange is a terr'ist!" thing.

Let's start of by stating, as a matter of self-evident truth, that if this latest leak had been of cables from another nation's diplomats - say Britain's - there would have been a round of back-smacking that American "very serious persons" hadn't been caught flat-footed like the hapless Brits, some analysis by foreign policy types and a great yawn of indifference from everyone else. The information contained in the cables, gleaned from diplomats talking to their opposite numbers in other countries, could have been pretty much the same. Few in America would care because in general Americans don't care anything like as much about foreign policy as they do about domestic politics. The fuss is almost entirely because the leaks were of American secrets, not because of the secrets themselves.

Much of the rest of the fuss, especially from conservative-leaning voices, is because the leaks came from Assange and the Wikileaks team on the heals of two other large document dumps from the U.S. I keep seeing tweets from right-leaning American national security types lamenting "why don't Wikileaks dump documents from another country? They hate America."

It may be true, but it's beside the point. I submit that the real reason Wikileaks haven't managed to leak secrets from other nations on this scale is that they take better care of their secrets. That is a key part of the proximate cause of all the trouble, but most American pundits are doing their level best to ignore the fact.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community was faced by two conflicting pressures. The first, which is the perennial problem of intelligence work, is the tendency to classify stuff that shouldn't be secret and to classify higher actual secret stuff that shouldn't be. The second, which became a pressure only after it was concluded that compartimentalization of data helped 9/11 happen because various agencies weren't sharing their part of the picture, was to a pressure to disseminate classified data as widely as possible to cleared individuals. Thus we arrived at monstrosities like the network from which the current cable dump was stolen - a vast repository of over 2 million somewhat-secret documents accessed by over 2.5 million individuals ranked all the way down to private. I'd like to quote my friend and one-time intelligence insider Ron Beasley here (emphasis mine):

The real embarrassment here is just how arrogant and incompetent the US government is. When I worked for the DIA long before PCs and the internet we used to joke that Confidential meant it was Time Magazine last week - Secret meant it would be in Time Magazine next week. You are right, a data base that 2 million people have access to is eventually going to be leaked.

When looking for blame to apportion, start there.

If U.S. diplomacy and U.S. prestige have taken a hit from these leaks, that's tough. This is the real world, not a fairytale. The U.S. created the conditions for the leaks - it must needs, as my Texan wife would put it, "pull up its big-girl panties and deal". It cannot play Ollie to Assange's Stan Laurel, claiming "Now look what you made me do".

That said, the actual thief must bear a great deal of the blame as the other necessary part of the proximate cause. While such a trove was a leak in waiting, it still needed an actual leaker. We've some notion of who that person might be, but no certainty other than that he or she was an American with access - not Assange or anyone else at Wikileaks. That person will doubtless be found guilty in a court of law of espionage, perhaps even treason, and must take whatever punishment the court decides.

Assange and Wikileaks, however, are at worst in the position of recieving stolen goods and distributing them (without payment). Assange is not a U.S. citizen and Wikileaks is not a U.S.-based organisation - nor did they do the actual thieving. If they have committed a crime, it is a far lesser one.

Just as a thought experimement, imagine the actual thief of the data had gone direct to the UK's Guardian or Germany's Der Spiegel newspapers rather than to Wikileaks, who then brokered the data. Do you imagine for one moment that either newspaper wouldn't have published such a scoop? Would quite so many people be calling a newspaper a "terrorist organisation", calling for the use of force, accusing the paper of espionage? No, it would just be journalism as usually practised in places where the media are not entirely the loyal lapdogs of the government. Glenn Greenwald has more on that theme.

And remember:

 "U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death."