Source: The Financial Times
WikiLeaks Shows Out-of-Control US SecrecyThe most obvious lesson from the WikiLeaks episodes is that officials who decry the leaks are right to assert that they illustrate a huge and intolerable security risk. But the risk is not from the leakers. Instead it is from a system, and indeed a culture, of secrecy in the US government that has run utterly out of control.
This is not immediately obvious, because the WikiLeaks affair has stirred up a storm of swirling, competing hypocrisies. On one level we have the hypocrisies revealed in the cables: of allies criticising each other; enemies posing as friends; and leaders pretending to their people that crass, criminal, duplicitous allies can also be dependable friends.
But such deceptions have always been commonplace in diplomacy, and should therefore produce little surprise. They confirm that the world is a nasty place, in which advancing national interests often involves working with bad guys, playing adversaries against one another, and accepting odious behaviour in the hope of avoiding something much worse.
Then there are the billowing hypocrisies surrounding the release of the documents. These include the self-congratulatory arguments of the leakers: from the individual who stole the cables to the reckless team at WikiLeaks that took it upon themselves to make the documents public and in so doing put lives and sensitive operations at risk.
Next come the self-righteous claims of private media organisations, who feel that they can behave within self-determined ethical standards that trump the laws of the countries in which they work. And perhaps most galling of all there are the pious denunciations of government officials who decry the damage done by the leaks, but then defend the much worse damage done by their own policies and actions.
Of course, there are upsides. The leaks inadvertently reveal the formidable courage and capabilities of many diplomats. It should also be clear that a free press has not only the right but the responsibility to shed light in corners of government operations that are kept deliberately dark to cover up misjudgments and wrongdoing.
Yet to prevent further security breaches of this sort, the administration must address their attention not to a single misguided enlisted man, or to a mercurial Internet gadfly. Rather, they must recognise that there cannot be true secrecy in a system in which over 3m people have security clearances.
This is a system in which millions of documents each year are unnecessarily classified – even though, as a top general once asserted to me, well over 95 per cent of the information being classified is already publicly available. In shining a light on this, WikiLeaks fully reveals the perverse and flawed information culture within US government.
The secret to keeping secrets is to have fewer of them, shared among fewer people. And a massive, comprehensive review and reform of how America keeps, shares and thinks about its secrets is one of the few benefits this unfortunate incident could produce.