Wikileaks and Info Freedom

Having given this a few days to settle out, I've some more reflections on it. Today Julian Assange turned himself in to UK police, which will probably keep him from dying "accidentally" somewhere. I have read some twaddle about him now being a "martyr" or underdog, but I'm sure the shift in public opinion would barely register.

I admit I'm a bit conflicted about the concept of this leak, though the original acquisition was blatantly illegal. Wikileaks has been described (by someone whose opinion I respect) as "the Press" as in freedom thereof. I am very much in favour of transparency and accountability whenever possible, but I am troubled by Assange/Wikileaks agenda. If their intent is only to hurt the USA, that isn't in my interest, therefore I'm suspicious of them. Keeping the Americans from thinking they're infallible is another mission though, and one I can get behind.

This doesn't mean that there can be no secrets, but sometimes the priorities that people set for security are questionable. In other words, save your effort for the critical stuff where blood and treasure are on the line. This has exposed a critical weakness in US info security and brought a lot into the open, much of which I think belongs there. That said, Assange is still a pompous ass and I won't regret his downfall IF he's broken some serious laws. OK, even if things are trumped up a bit, but it sets a bad precedent; at this time all of this remains to be proven.

So much of what I've seen to date of these "cables" was about a millimetre from open source anyway. It was stuff that anyone who was paying attention would have at least suspected, the interesting part is getting it confirmed. That said, I suspect that the legions of Assange fans, especially the new ones, are not in the class of people who actually put much effort into understanding what happens in the world. Deconstructing it, bitching about narrowly defined parts of it yes, but digging into it? I doubt it, especially parts that didn't agree with their worldview.

That's why I read things like Slate. It's not the most moonbattish thing out there, but it is a useful snapshot of the liberal view of the world and one that I can stomach, mostly. You go too far in either direction and the nutbars emerge, but I'm definitely more in tune with conservatives. Doesn't mean I should read only that though.

In any event, the Americans came off pretty well overall, and their diplomacy is less clueless than I had suspected. Results still count though, and if they can't execute the intel they have their stock doesn't go up that much. My hope is that a lot of what the Arab governments are doing that has been brought to light makes their populations think a little harder about how they'd really like things to work in their part of the world. It's too much to hope that they'll open embassies in Israel, but some more pragmatism about relations with Israel and the West would be valuable fallout from this.

I'm sure there'll be more; this isn't over by a long shot even if you dismiss the conspiracy theories.