On July 25, 2010, Wikileaks, a website devoted to publishing anonymous submissions of war-related documents, released 91,731 classified documents about the war in Aftghanistan.
The fallout of the wikileaks scandal has been slowly brewing. It took a while for people to process all the information and to determine the long term impact. Some disjointed thoughts from others and myself:
The Taliban is killing the Afghanis who collaborated with Americans.
Bruce Riedel at the Brookings Institute reports that intelligence gathering will be much tougher in the future.
I have to admit I'm enjoying watching the Pakistani ambassador doing major spin control on the morning news shows.
It appears that there are no real war crimes found in the leaks.
It's clear that in the age of zip drives and independent websites that leaks are the wave of the future. When Daniel Ellsberg copied the 47 volumes of information that would be known as the Pentagon Papers, he had to xerox each page. It took a long time. It took staffers two weeks to read all the information. There didn't have a "find" function to look for key words.
Editors at the New York Times had a long debate about the ethics of publishing the Pentagon Papers. Now, if the grown ups in the room won't publish sensitive information, there are a million of websites that will gleefully publish anything with no concern about long term significance.
In New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), Nixon sued the New York Times and Ellsberg to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court sided with the Times, because they said that the publication did not harm the country. They said that in order to exercise prior restraint, the government must show sufficient evidence that the publication would cause a "grave and irreparable" danger. In this age of instantaneous publication, there's no way that a government could stop the publication of sensitive documents, even those that did put troops in harm's way.
More from Scott Lemieux about NYT v. US and Wikileaks.
As we continue to outsource to contractors the business of war, there are going to be more opportunities for leaks.
Apt. 11d 
Now, if the grown ups in the room won’t publish sensitive information, there are a million of websites that will gleefully publish anything with no concern about long term significance.
There are also plenty of people who will gleefully shoot someone for painting a target on their brother, cousin, etc. It’ll probably get ugly and then balance out in the end.
I know you can have an anonymous web site, but that wouldn’t be seen as neutral or accurate. All you’d have to do to counter it is set-up a bunch of competing, inaccurate sites.
LikeLike
It probably does not help that the Wikileaks guy looks like a cross between Draco Malfoy and Montgomery Burns. And that the PFC who did much of the leaking looks sort of like Smithers.
LikeLike