Hi,

I agree with your comments 100%. This latest group of leaks moves Wikileaks firmly into the nuisance-maker category. Nothing constructive can come of it. I’m sure in their minds they view themselves as being Daniel Ellsburg-esque, but that is far from the reality of it. Let them go expose massive amounts of inside information from China or Russia or Iran and then perhaps I’ll believe they are anything more than just an anti-American group bent on doing damage to our nation.

Ha, America preaches openness and free speech until it is used against them, double standards oh my! Whatever happended to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? Blogentries and comments like here just confirm how justified the leak is, America has parted from its ideals in almost every way imaginable.

Andrew,
On most things we agree, but on this one, we don’t.
We all take umbrage when Yahoo! or Google are seen to be folding to pressures from China to do something in China’s national interest that we don’t like, yet a simple call from a staffer was all that it took here for Amazon to fold. It seems there was no due process, not even a mention of which T&C Wikileaks had breached, if any. This was an arbitrary action, in the old sense of the word.

Amazon has scored some cheap points. It is a sad day for democracy, commerce, cloud computing and freedom of expression. Amazon has global obligations. I will not be shopping there this Christmas.

The EFF had this to say:
Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports internet freedom, said it was not a violation of the first amendment but was nevertheless disappointing. “This certainly implicates first amendment rights to the extent that web hosts may, based on direct or informal pressure, limit the materials the American public has a first amendment right to access,” Bankston told the website Talking Points Memo.

This is a foot on the slippery path to censorship. What evidence has emerged that profoundly impacts anything other than the already shoddy reputation of the world’s politicians? What is the next step? Seize the domain? Ban newspapers from writing about it?

You mention Bismarck, he was the ur-cable leaker. I seem to remember something to do with Denmark.

I like what the ACLU said today.
“We’re deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be constitutional, or a good idea. The courts have made clear that the First Amendment protects independent third parties who publish classified information. Prosecuting WikiLeaks would be no different from prosecuting the media outlets that also published classified documents. If newspapers could be held criminally liable for publishing leaked information about government practices, we might never have found out about the CIA’s secret prisons or the government spying on innocent Americans. Prosecuting publishers of classified information threatens investigative journalism that is necessary to an informed public debate about government conduct, and that is an unthinkable outcome.

“The broader lesson of the WikiLeaks phenomenon is that President Obama should recommit to the ideals of transparency he invoked at the beginning of his presidency. The American public should not have to depend on leaks to the news media and on whistleblowers to know what the government is up to.”

Wikileaks is by no means perfect, but if there had been no wikileaks, speculate for a moment who Manning may have leaked that stuff to instead. Now that would be far more dangerous. Instead we can read what modern diplomacy is all about and make up our own mind.

Rather than quoting from the left, I’ll reply on Ronald Reagan: “Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.”

Did Amazon do the right thing? Of course. Their job is to earn a profit, and it’s harder to do that if you deliberately take positions that anger senators. Did Julian Assange do the Right Thing? That’s a harder question. I think you may have overestimated the harm and underestimated the benefit of Cablegate.

There’s a distinction between making *this set* of diplomatic messages public and making *all diplomatic messages ever* public. You write, “[W]e don’t need … a webcam constantly trained on the sausage factory of statecraft.” I agree. But this isn’t a webcam on statecraft — this is a photo album from last year. Since this was a one-time release, not a new policy of always publishing diplomatic correspondence, I don’t think the loss of frankness or openness with allies is a logical result.

The benefit of cablegate has just been moving information from “open secret” to “officially acknowledged.” Before last week I could have told you that North Korea is a Big Problem, that Karzai and his brother were profiting enormously from the drug trade, and that China was probably behind the Google account hacking. But having it move from suspected to confirmed is important. It makes it easier for countries to act because it gives their citizens information on what’s actually going on.

Other revelations were more serious, including pressure on America’s allies to let us get away with human rights violations[1] or the realization that the entire middle east has pressured the US to act against Iran while publicly pretending to Iran’s ally. This second point is the most important. While the US is highly transparent, many countries in the Middle East are not. Cablegate presented many of those citizens with a first unvarnished look at their leaders that stripped away the necessary duplicity of statecraft. Perhaps now that no one has to be the first
country to break with Iran, the region will work together more effectively to contain the threat.

Long-term harm to America’s ability to conduct statecraft? Hardly. The wikileaks revelations will make it easier, not harder to form coalitions that address threats that were privately acknowledged and are now widely acknowledged.

[1] “American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?pagewanted=all

It is understandable that many may be chocked and can consider the latest leaks as anti-American action. But it is not choking many others !

Please look at this graph (http://www.spiegel.de/flash/flash-24861.html) and see the evolution of the amount of information, its geographic concentration and distribution, and how USA is omnipresent, more and more, in all the world’s countries and problems… well nothing is new in the overview… What is new is that it gives factual trends and more it gives details, real ones, it gives truth with concrete documents.

In this way we can see the diplomatic and political actions through another lens and build a new, real insights … beyond “discourses”,” oriented” analysis, lobbies and stereotyped visions.

So I say + 1 for Thomas comment: “it is a sad day for freedom … bad point for Amazon”

From a personal point of view, I think that Americans should assume the omnipresence of their (elected) administration and its implication in the entire world. More important: they should not ignore that this implication isn’t well seen neither justified in the eyes of many Americans and non-Americans.

Although sometimes I hate nowadays-politic action, its actual hypocrisy, obscurity, and intently maintained complexity … I believe it is a necessity to govern the world (otherwise we fear the worst). But I believe also that electroshocks are welcomed from one time to another to open eyes and doors and to give new dynamics.

Finally, can I just add a question regarding your say “… US State Department communications that were intended to be private for good reason, and that should be kept private for good reason.” What do you mean by good reasons? Good for what and for whom ? For the world ? Or for USA “brand” and security? … May be this is very partial vision of the reality! That’s why wikileaks may be good !

Steve, thanks for taking the time to write.

I hear you arguing that good can and will come from Cablegate, and I don’t hear you acknowledging that any harm was done. That starts to sound to me like an argument for making all or most diplomatic cable traffic public. As I made clear in my post, I think very little of that argument.

Hi Thomas, always good to hear from you.

I don’t know all the details of Amazon’s decision to boot WikiLeaks. But I’d imagine their terms of service give them pretty broad discretion to kick off who they like, when they like. This is FINE by me. AWS is Amazon’s private property. They’re free to do with it what they like. Amazon is under no obligation to provide speech platforms for all those who want them.

And I don’t see this action by a corporation as any step toward censorship. I’ll start to worry seriously about that when WL can’t find anyone willing to publish their documents or host their site. The fact that one company has chosen not to does not indicate to me that we’re headed into a dark time of reduced freedom of expression on the Web.

I find the EFF’s statement misleading. Since Amazon is nowhere close to a hosting monopoly, it has no ability to ‘limit the materials [I have] a first amendment right to access.”

I didn’t say a word in my post about prosecuting WL, so I’m not sure why you’re including the ACLU’s statement. The 2nd paragraph of their statement seems to be saying that ‘all information needs to be free.’ I stated my opinion of that argument as clearly as I could in my original post.

And I find it VERY hard to believe that Reagan would have approved of Cablegate…

If seeking “publicity” was a crime, Lady Gaga would have been in prison long time ago. And Madonna’s web site (and many other web sites), would be shut down if “Anti-Americanism” was against the law. Release of information does not need to be “justified,” right? Illegally giving confidential/top secret information to others cannot be justified and that’s the only important (and most neglected) aspect of this leak.

But if you prefer to exercise free speech priniples selectively, why worry about information that may embarrass some people and not worry about information that may actually endanger the lives of others?

I am not sure why WikiLeaks has anything to do with this.

If this type of information was stolen and handed to Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw or Larry King

Would we be talking about shutting down the news networks?

Since you refer to the Pentagon Papers, here is Daniel Ellsberg’s “Open Letter to Amazon”:

http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/open-letter-to-amazon

Also recommended reading is Steven Aftergood’s The Race to Fix the Classification System”:

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/11/race_to_fix.html

the spying on UN chief is of no public interest, no? Laughable.

Well, yes, I am arguing that some good came of Cablegate, and relatively little harm, but it doesn’t follow that all diplomatic traffic should be public. The reason why there was no harm is that 1. the cables were all at least 10 months old and 2. this was understood as a breach in security, not a change in policy.

I completely agree that making all diplomatic messages public would be a disaster, but that’s not the question you raised in your article. You asked: “Am I missing some important aspect of Cablegate, some aspect that justifies the release to the world of this *particular batch* of information?” [empahsis added]. When evaluating specifically whether Wikileaks should have published this batch of documents, I can only conclude that there’s been limited harm, but benefits in the form of uncovering human rights abuses, bringing rare transparency to the citizens of the Middle East, and making open coalition-building easier to face the threats of a nuclear North Korea, and a soon-to-be nuclear Iran.

Anti-American – I wouldn’t say that.
Wikileaks depends on people who actualy leak information to them.
When you read carefully what they’re on about you see
they get information – build a little shell (an article and some structure) around that information
try to find other sources
and then publish that information.
Thing is:
Wikileaks is prim. famous in the USA, also since in the USA there are a lot of people working for the gouvernment there’s more potential whistleblowers, furthermore in the USA there’s so much information gathered that it’s hard to keep it focused ( the longer the chain, the weaker it gets )
plus it’s a “democracy”
unlike china or iran where its way harder to leak information
where you’re probably beat to death and the leak is gone before even 200 people read it
the gouvernment in the usa has no such possibilities.
in addition i do doubt that many chinese or irani people actualy know what wikileaks is and have access to it.
also it realy depends on the people
if people see no heroic act in publishing information, they don’t put their lives in danger
in the usa (due to hollywood and all that nationalism blabla) you do have a lot of people who are trained since childhood what an heroic act is – and have a clear idea on what it is to them.
the people who kill several hundred people in iraq, calling themselves soldiers, think of themselves as heros as
the people who leak information about the killings, as the gouvernor who’s trying to put wikileaks to an end or wikileaks who plan to change the world etcetc.

- the views, morality and ideas of the “western world” currently spread with amazing speed all over the globe,
making the uprising generations in the near and far east more “western” than they actualy are “eastern” on these terms. the globalisation has by far not reached its limits so far
thus:
wait 5 or 6 years
and then make a judgement
where there are no whistleblowers or where there is no knowledge or trust in wikileaks as a publisher now
may be there then.

ps: I’m sorry for my “bad english” or any mistakes made, I had to teach myself.

I would rather be informed about what is actually going on than be kept in the dark by some double-dealing idiocracy. Long live WikiLeaks… now at http://www.wikileaks.ch/

Andrew,

this time I strongly disagree with your views in this post. It seems quite strange to me that an advocate of free conversation within and outside organisations is now in favour of blocking it.

I agree that some of the leaks are just diplomatic gossip and don’t add a lot of value. However, learning that US spies on the UN or that US bribes and coerces governments into agreement (climate accord) is most disturbing. What’s most disturbing is the official reaction to Wikileaks and failed (and laughable) attempts to block it. I am too young to have had experienced it myself, but this sounds exactly the same as Petagon papers. I’d love to hear records of Obama’s & Clinton’s conversations now. I bet they sound like Nixon & Kissinger – arrogant, desperate, angry and with complete lack of respect for the democracy they preach.

—
http://wikileaks.mazeika.info

5. You can’t see what public interest is being served here? My guess is that is because you are the kind of person who can quote Bismarck on statecraft, and hang around with people who can quote Bismarck on statecraft. You ‘know’ how the world works. There are thousands, millions even, who don’t.

I find this depressing.

1. You’re absolutely correct about Amazon being within their rights. But their actions are inconsistent. Of course, they don’t have to use their resources to support ‘speech to all comers’. But neither should they be used to suppress. The cloud-vendors would seek to become part of the very infrastructure of the web – infrastructure is similar to a utility and we don’t allow our utilities to be used for political ends. Or, at least, we shouldn’t. Has Amazon banned any of the newspapers who actually published the data?

2. I’m sure there are people out there who believe ‘all information should be free’ and believe that we should enter a permanent state of total transparency. I’m not one of them – but I fully support what #wikileaks are doing at the moment. I’m a voter and it’s plain from looking at the leaks that I’ve simply not been able to do my job in recent years. The press haven’t provided enough context for the major decisions that have been made. And the secrecy, so vital to diplomacy and international relations, has been abused and debased. Of course, there needs to be secrecy. But once in a while we need transparency so we can all recalibrate and approach the words of our leaders with the healthy skepticism that all in power deserve.

3. The leaks have been released worldwide. It’s not necessarily an ‘anti-American’ thing. In fact, I’d say that America comes out of this tolerably well (with a few notable exceptions – in fact, I’d say the responses to the leaks have revealed a lot more unsavoury details about the US than the leaks themselves. I astounded that the calls by US politicians and media outlets for extra-judicial killings aren’t provoking more outrage. For pity’s sake, your country is founded on opposition to this!). I imagine that a big reason for putting out US cables is simply because the US has the biggest intelligence networks and gathers the most intelligence.

4. More subtle (meaning a bit of a cop out here ie I’m not sure if I can fully explain), is the huge value of the ‘gossip’. In any discussion or debate, there is a centre. If you stray too far from this centre, then you are – logically and parsimoniously – labelled as a fruitcake. I am not at all interested in people who claim the moon landings to be fake, for example. These people are out there on the edge, away from the more rational centre.

“But in the case of many of the big debates on international policy in recent years we have had a debate centred around a phony ‘centre’. This is a quote from a (broadly speaking, anti-wikileaks) blog post at The Economist:

So far the interesting material is on Arab states’ and America’s relationships with Iran. It seems all those fervid background-only reports of Arab states urging America to bomb Iran, which I mistrusted at the time, were true.”

If an Economist reporter thought these things to be ‘fervid’, it’s likely that others did too. This means that debate in this area was stifled. Gossip here is good, valuable stuff. It provides vital context. I can’t be alone in feeling a sense of vindication that some of my suspicions about the machinations of diplomacy – not discussed at all in mainstream media and therefore not a ‘legitimate’ matter on the political agenda – have been confirmed.

(And I can’t be alone in seeing parallels between this and E2.0?)

Whoops. Not sure what happened to the numbering there.

So far the interesting material is on Arab states’ and America’s relationships with Iran. It seems all those fervid background-only reports of Arab states urging America to bomb Iran, which I mistrusted at the time, were true.”

[...] is to increase transparency by making important information more widely available and, as I wrote earlier, “to help surface information that exposes corruption, coverups, and rank hypocrisy in high [...]

Andrew, good to read a calmly expressed and straight-forwardly put opinion.

I think, though, Julian’s essay shows us he wants regime change, not regime change. I mean, there’s a difference between ‘change for good’ and ‘replacement change’. Julian, like myself, probably thinks some regimes need complete replacement. However, whistle-blowing isn’t the way to make that happen. Only revolution (peaceful or violent) and war can replace regimes and that’s always ugly. Furthermore, putting ‘justice’ above transparency as an agenda does not make him not a whistle-blower (double negative intended). If he’s genuine about justice, that’s a good thing.

I think you owe it to your readers to admit it’s just his methods you disagree with. In that regard you must be VERY explicit. I do appreciate that you cited an example of how a real person might suffer adversely due to the leak. Though, it’s easy to make armchair assertions about how certain cables might result in innocent people being harmed.

His site IS a whistle-blowing site and these leaks are whistle-blowing actions. He didn’t hack and steal those documents. They were (correct me if I’m wrong) leaked to him by U.S. citizens who presumably believed their actions were consistent with the agenda of transparency: exposing injustice, corruption and other unhealthy behavior to see them eliminated through social pressure. Transparency has just ends. Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

Whistle-blowing is a legitimate action in a free society. You must be careful not to decry it. Also, while you are entitled to speak as a U.S. citizen and express U.S. concerns, this is also bigger than the U.S. If you don’t recognize that then you’ll sound like a closed-minded “regimist” instead of a justice-minded humanist.

long live americas freedom of information … isn´t that something you are so proud of? What kind of justice do you have if a call from any gov representative is reason enough to cut the cables of someone´s web presence. your credit card. your paypal. your freedom. where does this stop? next time maybe your blog? who knows …. this is once again a truely american way of judgement … don´t practice what you preach!

Before you dismiss Stewart Brand’s quote that ‘Information wants to be free,’ you should read it in its full context.

“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”

It strikes me as apropos as ever.

Dool

You’ve said you’ve seen nothing in what’s been released to make you ashamed of American diplomacy, whilst the leak of that nonshameful information makes for embarrassment. People aren’t, I think, generally, embarrassed about that of which they are not ashamed. So perhaps there’s a bit of a contradiction here.

As for the non-leakage of memos from non US-sources, perhaps the diplomatic organisations of other nations are a bit more careful aout how they control their information. Stuff can only get leaked if it’s available; not if it’s properly controlled. Why the hue and cry over Wikileaks, when people ought to be asking how come, with all the billions of its taxpayers money that the US spends on so-called security, someone can just get hold of all this senstive stuff and make it public at the push of a button?

I am surprised to read such a 1.0 argument here. Just like writing in the internet needs politeliness and generates much value, I don’t think officers would need to throw crude comments to describe some situation and make a great job for their nation. This is just something they must take responsibility of. If their comments are true and as objective as possible, they will not be ashamed when some comment is released.

Funny that governments wish to put webcams everywhere, except that into their offices.

And, even if WikiLeaks was wrong, stopping its free activity is a violation of freedom. Fullstop. “Silly” and “stupid” are words that rarely are told with wisdom, they are intended to bias the reader opinion…

Why does the USA not just order a HIT on Assange ?
That could save even more time.

> Am I missing some aspect of Cablegate …

WL has value to the academic community.

I am currently working on an update to earlier studies of the state of the Internet in Cuba, and found this WL document quite useful and relevant:

US Interests Section, Havana, Memo 10HAVANA84, created 2010-02-09, released 2010-12-16, http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10HAVANA84.html.

This memo was helpful in my analysis and also gave a feel for the way diplomats work and interact.

It would be interesting to see WL clones with the resources to perform a similar function in other nations.

Ah, but now it is 2 months later and the the emptiness of their ‘democracy’ is naked. The empire, is crumbling.
Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Bahrain, American puppets all. Brazil loudly supports Israel’s 1967 borders, and with back against the wall the americans are forced to not shelter Israel from the censure of the Security council. They have gone, in ten short years, from the New Roman Empire, the Hyperpower, The True Inheritor of the Eagles …

To Isabella’s España. Gold and God they can destroy anything but build nothing. The Chinese laugh almost openly now, wondering when to flood the world with cheap paper, waiting perhaps for this new Reformation to catch in the dry tinder of the House of Saud. You can not threaten your banker, nor can you kill your future customers.

You need to build. And they have forgotten how. Expediency is a poor substitute for what they had even 12 years ago. As a neighbour, I feel sad, but as a man, I appreciate the lesson. Live the right way and people will flock to your side. Live the wrong way and they will leave. However, to live the second and preach the first makes you hated, and your great accomplishments now are tainted.

How sad, my brothers, how sad.

That could save even more time.