The “Wikileaks” controversy proceeds to grow and mutate, like Clostridium botulinum in a Petri dish with spoiled pork, and I’ve avoided talking about it up till now.
Wikileaks is a website devoted to publishing leaked documents from governments and other scandal-prone institutions. You probably know the major players, and the various permutations of the story. You can hardly miss them. Because of that, I’m not going to go through the story in detail. Instead, I’d like to take a step back and offer a few “meta-thoughts” … ideas that might help produce a good conclusion.
- Republican forms of government require a great deal of transparency, though not on everything. There are military secrets and diplomatic info-dumps that, for our security, would best remain secret and un-dumped.
- Politicians, soldiers and bureaucrats tend to hate transparency. Why? They don’t like being second-guessed by “non-professionals.” So they often make government more opaque than it should be.
- Some of our leaders have tried to put nearly everything foreign-policy-related into the tightest security, demanding high clearances even for viewing. Much of this is self-serving, not truly security-related.
- A government worker who breaks security protocols to leak documents can be at once a hero and still prosecutable by law.
Now’s a good time to rethink transparency and our government’s secrecy protocols.
But, rethought or not, no one’s been surprised to learn of more amazing lapses in ethics and judgment on the part of our leaders.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
8 replies on “Secrecy Broken”
I haven’t paid much attention to this issue. I do however, find the caterwauling in our government this time pretty intereting. I may be wrong, but I heard that the info dump the last time had much more national security information exposed and put more lives in potential danger. And, I heard that this dump was just emails from our “leaders” disparaging leaders in other countries. So, I conclude, if this is true, that our “leaders” are more concerned about how they look than how much damage is caused to our people. Sad to say, I’m sure that’s a fair assessment of our current “leaders”.
It also supposedly makes Hillary Clinton look bad. Could this have been engineered by Obama setting her up for a fall for 2012?
Paul,
I completely agree with you. I may even go further. I bothers me that the cloak of privacy and secracy is applied to those who represent me in an offical capacity and then they don’t want to tell me what they are doing. Something is wrong with this picture.
Truth is our government is not transparent. Again, you are right.
Treating folks like family—
This is the same sort of info gathering on foreign diplomats that Hillary had used to keep track of Bill. Probably why she saw it as such a routine thing. Just a lot harder for her to deny it now.
As I understand it, no undercover folks were actually compromised with this leak. It just showed that the adminimstration of our government had been doing dirty things on the side, and that these were things that Congress was also unaware of.
The Alinskiites will justify any activity that leads to further themselves. and central control of people.
Remains to be seen if the protective inclusions of our Constitution and republic can shed itself of these folks and heal.
What Wikileaks proves is the total and utter incompetence of:
1) the US State Department to do anything.
2) the total and utter incompetence of the government’s security appparatus to keep anything secret.
3) The total and utter lack of competence on the part of not less than 3 of our past administrations to do anything about protecting us from those who would do us harm.
4) Has anyone noticed that the people at the top all hail from the same eastern elitist schools? How come we would expect any different results when the people staffing the place all come from the same places?
Mr. Jacob,
Thank you for cutting through the usual fog and confusion, your position on necessities in a republic are as insightful as always. Please don’t stop.
Charles Routh, Ph.D.
Why you gotta pick on Clostridium botulinum? What’s that bacterium ever done to you?
The calls to assassinate Assange are typical statist calls for secrecy. I’ve seen no example that endangers anyone’s life, but many authors saying that’s what’s happened. If our government “servants” have been honest and ethical, they’ve nothing to fear from the leaks.
Seems to me, many of the attacks on Wikileaks are from statist thieves who have something to hide. At least two good things has come of it. First, Hillary (who broke the law asking diplomats to spy) will no longer hold public office after this term. And second, we have more evidence of the folly of our presence in Afghanistan (after all, it was Al Quaeda who attacked us, not the Taliban). We should have taken Ron Paul’s advice to issue letters of marque and reprisal for the leaders of Al Quaeda and gone to war against them, not countries.
This wbeiste makes things hella easy.