that was by far the most well written text on the subject…

I would like to see Sean reply to this as well…

I take your argument here to be basically “sometimes government does bad things and hides them, but often good government requires secrecy — for example, diplomacy.” This argument was made, in fact, by an ex-diplomat here: http://buildingmarkets.org/blogs/blog/2010/11/29/in-defense-of-secrecy/

For a fairly devastating rebuttal of that particular case I would encourage you to read http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/two-handed-engine-wikileaks-the-defense-of-diplomatic-secrecy-and-east-timor/ Personally it did much to convince me that the “necessary secrecy” argument, if not obviously wrong, certainly can’t be taken as given.

Yeah. In a nut-shell.

This sordid excuse for ‘journalism’ has been going on gangbusters since 9-11-01.

Tell us something we really didn’t know. (Although I’m positive that you know we already knew it too).

Of course, the media, and most of the rest of the population, bought it hook line and sinker. I mean, what do we expect ? Actual intellectual discourse??

<== only partly being sarcastic.

My instincts are to support this stuff, as I have in the past, but I’d prefer it they provided a rather more righteous flag to rally behind.

The real issue is that someone stole the information. This person broke the conditions of their employment and necessarily lied and practised deception to extract the information.
Is this amoral behaviour really the kind of behaviour we want to encourage? Amorality has no boundaries and threatens far more than a few daft diplomatic cables. Do you consider it is OK to steal the proprietary secrets of your company? Is it OK steal the missile defence plans? Is it OK to steal your boss’s private communications?
But this is not the same you say. Do you really expect a person who has abandoned principled behaviour to make fine distinctions based on principles?

We all recognise the need to expose egregious wrong doing and that this supersedes other commitments. This is the test we should be applying when judging the behaviour of the various actors in this little tempest. Principled people will expose egregious wrong doing, unprincipled people will steal anything that supports their narrow world view.

“I shit better men than you.”

(from A Song of Ice and Fire by GRR Martin)

Sean, if you’re leaking wikis, you should go see a doctor. Or a reporter. Probably both.

Also, publication of many of the criticisms in the less significant leaks also arguably benefit the US, as a reproach to the subjects or again a sharing of accountability, even at the cost of a few bruised egos.

So you don’t have to wear a very thick tin hat to believe that overall the leak saga is a backhanded benefit to the US, and therefore might well have been tacitly sanctioned, with the genuinely embarrassing or damaging material (if any) simply a useful prop or, if you like, a price worth paying, to support the fiction of the leaks being unintentional.