How WikiLeaks threatens transparency

It sounds nonsense to me to blame Wikileaks for making transparency opponents make more opposed to transparency. When you point out a problem, sometimes the people who don't want this problem to be solved will take even more radical measures to make sure it is kept secret. Giving up because of this is like giving up fighting terrorism because your actions can anger terrorists and they might kill more people. Also it's not clear from the current leaks whether they would have been prevented if there was less transparency between governmental bodies.

Governments have to learn that obscurity is not the same as security just as much as the IT world had to come to terms with it.<p>You can't 'hide' stuff and assume that it won't come back to bite you any longer. So stuff that you could get away with and sweep under the rug in the past now has the nasty habit of surfacing.<p>Wikileaks does not threaten transparency at all, it - or its successor - will enable a society that will either simply act more responsible and will deal with living in this new nice glass house or there will be a series of scandals. The genie is as likely to go back in to the bottle as the file sharing one.<p>The public is getting a rare taste of what their government is up to and so far secret really does seem to equate with 'can't stand the light of day'.<p>If secret was only 'will hurt our society if known' then wikileaks wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

Those that threaten transparency will threaten it whether wikileaks exists or not. The point of wikileaks is to expose these people and have them removed so they can be replaced by people who are for transparency at which point wikileaks will become irrelevant.<p>The just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed, wikileaks provides information on what the government is doing so the people may judge whether it is just.

Secret information sharing between government departments is not "transparency."<p>If the government didn't classify stuff like this in the first place, it could easily share it between departments without worrying about whether it would get leaked or not. That would be transparent.<p>The information release didn't endanger people. It just endangered policy. If the government would stop doing things that are unpopular and embarrassing, it could stop classifying so much.<p>Maybe then we'd once again have a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."

Pfc. Manning's massive leak of low-level classified documents (assuming he is the responsible party, as alleged) was an act of inspired immaturity. He does not have the education or experience to make any sense of the trove of documents, let alone the time to actually read more than a fraction of them, but must have acted either on the assumption "classified equates to bad" or simply an impulse to get away with something.<p>No adversary is likely to learn anything they didn't already know (and apparently the press has not either), although it potentially gives large well-funded adversaries like Russia and China a great source for drawing case-study training materials.<p>The damage is to our own intelligence and diplomatic internal affairs, both in scrambling to do damage control and changing procedures.<p>The material is of great interest to arm chair intelligence analysts; plenty of blogging material.

The argument is not that WikiLeaks should stop what they are doing because of this collateral damage, but that we should recognize what the most likely immediate impact will be to this revelation: less information sharing. A leak of some sort would not have been prevented with less transparency between governmental bodies, but now State can say that if their classified data was kept internal this particular info would not have been released. If staff from one department leak information from another department it only reinforces distrust between agencies and slows down the progress towards openness within government.

"Our success in Afghanistan depends on open information sharing."<p>We've had 100,000 troops chasing 500 key people for nearly a decade. I'd say we already lost the most expensive game of hide-and-seek ever...

This article threatens our intelligence.