* If you honestly think that the United States would just sit back and say “well, there’s all our secrets dumped on a website for the world to dig through, ah well, easy come easy go” and do nothing – if you really think any government, under any President, would just say “cat’s out of the bag, let it slide” – kill yourself. Because you are a mental defective and are too stupid to participate in society.
* Now, what should the government do? Hell, what can the government do? Here we get to the party piece of the Internet – it’s distributed and robust and redundant and literally impossible to shut down altogether. Going forward, there should be a lot more circumspection about what sort of data is appropriate to share internally and with who – we went from a system of mutually locked-out silos to one where apparently three million people have clearance rated Secret or up. Seriously, how many people in the Defense Department need access to diplomatic gossip from State?
* Everybody is up in arms about the Library of Congress blocking access to the site, or defense contractors shutting down access to the site – let me explain something from the position of somebody who’s done time in government IT. If information is restricted in any way, you have an affirmative obligation as a government IT employee to maintain that restriction. Even if classified material leaks – hell, even if “sensitive but unclassified” material leaks – you are still obligated to treat it as appropriately classified until the appropriate authorities make a change in that classification. So if you’re running the network, and there is an exposed site sharing that information, you are legally obligated to restrict access to that site. Sure, somebody else broke the rules, but as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you are still on the hook to discharge your duty with regard to information security. It may seem ridiculous, but that’s how it works, so pull the stick out of your ass if some people are still trying to do their job in the middle of this shitshow.
* There seems to be an attitude in some quarters that having all this in the public eye is a good thing, because government should never have secrets from “the people.” Setting aside the fact that “the people” are generally assholes, that’s not what you’ve got here. What you’ve got here is government secrets exposed to everybody. Does anybody seriously think that the business of the government should be 100% transparent to everyone in the world at all times? Say hi to the other Smurfs when you go back to fantasy gingerbread land.
* Everyone keeps banging on about the Pentagon Papers, trying to draw some sort of parallel – the 1971 leak by Daniel Ellsberg was a good thing, so therefore this must also be a good thing. The difference there is that, to the best of my recollection, the Pentagon Papers were entirely germane to the Vietnam War. The current flood of information coming out of the Wikilinks leaks is not limited to the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, but instead touches on almost every aspect of US foreign relations, military or otherwise. In a way, this is less effective – instead of the story being the actual revelations of things going awry in Kabul or Baghdad, the story is just that there were revelations – details not important, maybe some of the more salacious stuff briefly – and then becomes the whole cat-and-mouse of “will they arrest the guy, will they shut down the server, blah blah blah.” This is the sort of place where leaking to the New York Times or the Washington Post in the 70s meant that the pertinent stuff would get edited into some sort of narrative. Just throwing it up into the wind in 2010 means that the media will run with the meta rather than the content. Typical.
* And finally, we come to the bit that most people outside the right wing are ignoring: PFC Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who is supposedly the source of the most massive leak. He’s going to catch a court-martial. As well he should. In any profession, there are things that are not compatible with the requirements of the profession. If you’re a therapist, you don’t sleep with your patients. If you’re a pro athlete, you don’t bet on your own team. And if you’re an Army intelligence analyst, you don’t ship hundreds of thousands of government secrets to a foreign website. Maybe he thought he had good reasons, maybe he was even right about those reasons, but you know what? That makes no difference at all. At the very least, he’s headed to an intimate familiarity with Leavenworth, at worse – well, I don’t know if the Army is prepared to give him the Danny Deever, but before you leak classified information, you should think long and hard about whether it’s worth the consequences. If he dies, he dies – buy the ticket, take the ride.