I see Hillary Clinton is all indignant about the latest Wikileaks release. And there will be no end of hand-wringing in journalistic and political circles about whether this material should have been leaked, released, published etc. (But you have to admit, it’s great stuff; I particularly like the comments about the the looney leader of North Korea is still “quite a good drinker.”) And there is, of course, important data that the public ought to have, and I think the NY Times did the right thing by publishing the material.
But there’s another side of this, something that Clinton and Obama and the whole CIA/national security/spy apparatus ought to already know: These days, it’s really hard to keep anything secret for long.
Daniel Ellsberg had to make clandestine photocopies of thousands of pages of Pentagon Papers docs, then smuggle them out of his office and slip them to a Times reporter in a hotel room. These days? Click of a mouse. Hard to trace, impossible to stop. Once documents of any sort have gone to more than one or two people, you might as well assume they’re going out to the whole world.
Anyone who uses email on a professional basis has been told that. Think of poor Brad the Cad. About time the secretary of state caught on.