Wikileaks

For all of you who are put off by the length of my posts this one should make you happy.  I make no promises about the length of future posts.

Wikileaks is in the process of dumping their third mass of internal U.S. government documents.  I have not been able to figure out the publication schedule on this dump.  I know they have posted a number of the more juicy ones but I don't know when the remainder of the rumored 250,000 posts are due out.  Nevertheless . . .

This is the third major dump of U.S. documents.  The first dump was on Afghanistan.  The second dump was on Iraq.  This dump appears to be a bunch of internal U.S. State department documents.  Now, I am all for doing something about excessive secrecy.  There is a need for some secrecy.  But 99% of everything that is classified is not classified because it needs to be.  A large percentage of classification is CYA.  Someone doesn't want the embarrassing stuff to leak out.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and someone doesn't want the rottenness to be put on public display. An even greater source of unnecessary classification is bureaucratic.  No one wants to authorize stuff to be declassified.  It is always seen as being safer to classify as much as possible.  You wouldn't want to be the person who was responsible for the one in a million document that should have remained classified to have been released, even if it means classifying 999,999 documents that shouldn't have been.

People forget that the Clinton administration declassified tons of stuff and generally improved the situation by making it harder to classify stuff and easier to get things declassified in a timely manner.  The George W. Bush administration promptly reversed that decision and cranked the classification machine up way past where it had been before Clinton got in.  And one of the failures of the Obama administration is that it has retained the Bush policies.  So, seen as a push back to over classification, Wikileaks has been a breath of fresh air.  99% of what they have published has been stuff that ranged from "shouldn't have been classified" to "mildly embarrassing".  They haven't been as assiduous as they should have been at scrubbing things like names that can and will be used by bad guys to do bad things.  But nobody gets it 100% right.

The U.S. government is not the only organization that is guilty of over classification and that deserves to be embarrassed.  Pretty much every government in the world does the same thing to a greater or lesser extent.  And, whatever flaws you attribute to the U.S., and I attribute a lot of flaws to the Bush administration and some flaws to Obama, there are several much worse actors out there and many that are just as bad.

So, if the Wikileaks people have more material from the U.S., my advice is to not publish it.  Your credibility is on the line here.  The next thing you need to publish is a big dump of stuff from someone else.  If you don't have any stuff from someone else, that's a major problem and you need to put ALL of your efforts into fixing that problem.  You need to especially target governments or institutions generally seen by the U.S. as bad guys.  You need to put some balance into your program.

There are two ways to look at Wikileaks.  The way they would prefer to be seen is as a high minded anti-secrecy operation.  The second way is as an anti-American organization with some kind of political axe to grind.  It is now up to them to provide some evidence that the former view is the correct one.  Unless they do a large dump of somebody elses' dirty laundry next then the the only reasonable conclusion is that the latter characterized is the correct one.

(added 11/30/10) Web posts indicate that Wikileaks has a bunch of documents from a big U.S. bank.  The speculation is that the bank is Bank of America.  There are a lot of Wall Street people that should be in jail.  And I am confident that a number of them work at BofA.  So if this document dump eventually leads to jail time for some of these people, that's a good thing and Wikileaks would deserve some credit.  But it's not enough.  It is still necessary for Wikileaks to demonstrate that it is not just on some kind of anti-US jihad.  And to do that it must do a non-US document dump.  While I believe there are a number of bad actors at BofA that are currently getting away with their villainy, BofA is still a US entity.