The Sixth Estate

This past week saw another round of WikiLeaks cables released. Few of them seem to have relevance to Canada, but we do (once again) show up on a Secret list of terrorist targets around the world.

The list is a document that American diplomats prepare and circulate annually, and when some other versions appeared in the past, the leak was denounced as endangering lives. I disagree. The contents of this list are strategic resources. Terrorists do not attack militarily strategic resources: they aim to produce an emotional and political response, not a military one. (more…)

Bloomberg and other media have reported that one of WikiLeaks’s sources may have been peer-to-peer networks. “Evidence” for this assertion comes from a private Internet intelligence company in Pennsylvania, Tiversa. Bloomberg also assembled a range of supportive quotes from supposed media advocacy organizations in Washington, all of whom sagely agree that this proves evidence of wrongdoing by WikiLeaks. The implication seems be that this is further evidence for an eventual criminal case against WikiLeaks and its high-profile director, Julian Assange.

It’s a sad, sorry spectacle. It proves exactly why WikiLeaks is so important — and exactly why the corporate media is increasingly making itself irrelevant, with sad consequences for our democracy.

(more…)

One of the greatest ironies of some of the heavy-handed government responses to WikiLeaks is, as a new Secrecy News policy release proves, that it is illegal for people with security clearances to access leaked classified documents, but legal for people without security clearances. To this end, people who work for the military are not allowed to read WikiLeaks. The ironies of bureaucracy strike yet again.

The problem, at its heart, is a legal one. People in certain positions in government are subject to legal restrictions on what they are allowed to access or communicate (I won’t say can access or communicate, because that confuses legal threat with personal will, which is how we get into these sorts of paradoxes in the first place). That’s true even after information is leaked, because formally even leaked information is still classified. A document can be “Secret,” or even “Top Secret,” without actually being a secret.

(more…)