Wikileaks

As you are no doubt aware, there will be a lot of press attention given to the diplomatic cables that will be released by the website Wikileaks over the next few hours/days/weeks. I do not know what the impact will be, and if I was to weigh it I would say the impact will be somewhere between a black eye for American diplomacy and World War III. My general feeling is that the release of classified information in the manner chosen by Wikileaks is an act of information anarchy in the information age, and I don't think that approach will end well in the long term even if there are no obvious impacts in the short term.

I also consider what Wikileaks is doing to be an act of international terrorism as defined by United States Code: Title 18,2331 - against both the government and people of the United States. If the folks who run Wikileaks were to expire by means of accident or otherwise, I would shed the same number of zero tears and fake the same amount of non-existent outrage that I do every time any other terrorist is killed.

If I am to be honest, the piety found on the Wikileaks website that attempts to explain the reasoning of those behind the release of the diplomatic cables does little to persuade me of some righteous cause, and quite frankly I find their feeble attempt to excuse themselves up front from the consequences of their actions irresponsible and disgusting. By action Wikileaks is treating sovereign disagreement of nations with indignation and the private discussions and disagreements of governments as a global game of checkers.

It is the choice of each author at Information Dissemination to discuss the contents being released at Wikileaks. For myself, I will be discussing items I find relevant to discussions. The internet is written in ink, and this information is public regardless of ones opinion about it. I do not endorse the actions of Wikileaks but I will not ignore it either. If the content is relevant for discussion on this forum - it will be discussed. I have discussed content released by AQAP and al Shabab, for example, and see the discussion of materials on Wikileaks as any other discussion of content produced by a terrorist organization.

If a reader wishes to express their opinion regarding the Wikileaks policy on ID - this is the post to do so. Keep it professional. I am not interested in a comment section with direct links to Wikileaks, and will delete comments that do that in this thread (future threads that link are fair, as long as they remain on topic).

Are there winners and losers? Yes. The loser is US diplomacy, and the winner is anyone who opposes US diplomacy. Other than that, winning and losing in the context of Wikileaks is probably too subjective to be accurate.