Wikileaks

A quick note on wikileaks. The justification for the publication of secret material illegally stolen from the United States government is that wikileaks is dedicated to exposing corruption. However, little in the leaked material to date suggests corruption in the slightest, but rather it portrays realistic American diplomats working to advance the interests of the United States and being publicly much more truthful than any other nation on earth.

W.C. Varones points out that in the past wikileaks has exposed corruption in China and Russia. That may be so, but that argument doesn't hold water in this latest fiasco. Diplomacy requires a certain amount of secrecy and hypocrisy. If that is all our government were guilty of, I would be very happy indeed.

Now, the reaction to the leaks has also been abysmal. Calling for death for Assange is unacceptable, the real traitor is the American with the clearance who downloaded and removed the material. We need to keep a level head on the matter. Perhaps a life prison term for PFC Bradley Manning will be appropriate punishment to deter others.

As a separate matter, the IT security of the U.S. military has taken another black eye. Clearly PFC Manning no "need to know" the material he had downloaded, yet lack of controls allowed him free run of the federal government's entire classified network. There are any number of technical solutions to prevent this outcome, but the U.S. seemed oblivious to the insider threat. Further, I agree with those who point out that we have made the problem of protecting secrets too difficult by over-classification. Much of the material, while embarrassing, is certainly not a matter of national security. In fact, if the embarrassing though inconsequential information had been passed through unclassified channels, but encrypted only for those intended to read it, much of the material would have never been published in the first place. The operational assumption that data is secure because the network is secure proved to be fallacious, because it ignores the insider threat.