Say that ten times fast:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday denounced the disclosure this week of 75,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan war by the Web site WikiLeaks, asserting that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged the ability of others to trust the United States government to protect their secrets. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates portrayed the documents as “a mountain of raw data and individual impressions, most several years old” that offered little insight into current policies and events.
“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world…Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries… We endeavor to push access to sensitive battlefield information down to where it is most useful — on the front lines — where as a practical matter there are fewer restrictions and controls than at rear headquarters…In the wake of this incident, it will be a real challenge to strike the right balance between security and providing our frontline troops the information they need.”
Mr. Gates said the documents’ disclosure had prompted a rethinking of a trend nearly two decades old, dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991, of trying to make intelligence information more accessible to troops in combat situations so they can respond rapidly to developments.
Meanwhile, the leaker-in-chief, Assange, plans to leak more documents:
Assange said he wasn’t surprised by the White House’s condemnation of the leak. He said the U.S. government, like other scrutinized subjects, seeks to “criticize the messenger to detract from the power of the message.” He also rejected the notion that the leak would pose a security risk for the United States, saying that the material is more than seven months old and had no “operational consequence.”
Assange told reporters in London that what’s been reported so far on the leaked documents has “only scratched the surface” and said some 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.
Now that we know what the New York Times thinks of all this, what is your opinion on the ethics of the Wikileaks case?
Cheers!
I see this as a complex issue, Chip. While I approve of the idea of leaking secretive documents, the types of documents and the purpose of the leakers makes this complex. I don’t know Assange’s motivations. He said, “the method is transparency, the goal is justice,” but this might be a cover for “the method is theft, the goal is anarchy.” The balance between what is truly national security, and what the government says is national security but without much substance to the assertion, is real and difficult to navigate. We learn that governments cannot be totally trusted, yet, at the same time, we learn that some secrets the governments should keep. There is great ambiguity here that Wikileaks forces us to confront and think consciously about.
On the human level, as opposed to the institutional level, there are serious ethical problems. Real people are put in real mortal danger because of a leaked military document: not just Americans, but Afghanis and Poles and others involved in the Afghanistan War. This is what makes the motivation of the leakers so important to have full knowledge of: could they have safely redacted the names on the documents, and other identifying information? If they did, would this be any different than what governments would release and, therefore, the value of the leaked document would lose its substantial value? I think that the leakers could have redacted some names without the leak losing substantial value, but since leakers rarely know which names to redact and which not to, they choose to do no redacting whatsoever.
We can live in a world with Wikileaks, or we could live in a world without Wikileaks. Considering the technology available and the inability to control it, I don’t think we have a choice. Is the world without Wikileaks a better, safer world? I doubt it. Wikileaks functions somewhat like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as a government watchdog. Unfortunately, Wikileaks does not have a clear code of conduct like HRW and Amnesty, which makes this situation much more uncertain. We are better off with government watchdogs, but we are better off only when the code of conduct is clear.
In the end, I don’t have a straightforward position on it, mostly because the ethics of it are very complex. What I like about it is that we are forced to confront these issues, and think about the world in which we live, and leak.
Thanks, mate!
Looks like there’s all kinds of ambiguity here, like the right to know vs. the right for Poles and Yanks and Afghans to not be murdered by the Taliban because some amoral sucker of dead dog’s arseholes thought it was “just” to leak information that puts them at risk.
I won’t charge you any quid for use of the scare quotes, mate.
Cheers!
What information is ok to leak, then, Chip?
Information regarding the ‘orrible words one ‘as to put into the anti-spam box on this website, like “scrotus.”
Cheers!