feste_sylvain

In general, I believe that WikiLeaks holds an important place in the world. That's not to say that I think that they should report each and everything they get; I'm still remembering Cheney outing Valerie Plame as a spy, putting her life and her whole family's life in danger. Also, as a holder of a Security Clearance, I know fully well that some information is kept secret for very good reasons. So no, I won't tell you any.

But many of the things that WikiLeaks has exposed should never have been classified in the first place. Overclassification is a real problem; when the information that some random buck private needs to do their job is classified, and you thus have to start handing out clearances willy-nilly, you've exactly set the stage for the latest bombshell of leaks.

When the bombshell dropped, many people got all het up about it; Secretary of State Clinton suddenly had to scramble to repair many relationships (which is understandable), but her husband flipped out and claimed that people would be losing their lives over these leaks.

<crickets/>

That's right: you haven't heard about any lives lost over those leaks. That's because this was not the kind of information which would lead to people being killed. This is exactly why I said that the information itself was overclassified. But a clearance is a clearance, so anyone who had access to this information also had access to information which could lead to someone's death, if exposed.

Naturally, the Powers That Be decided that WikiLeak's founder and figurehead, Julian Assange, had to be rounded up for the safety of, well, the Powers That Be. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how decentralized agencies like WikiLeaks work. But they were not alone in this, of course: many other supporters and detractors rushed to opposing sides, all focused on a guy who really loves having attention focused on him.

As you've undoubtedly heard by now, the actual charges used to arrest Assange were two rape charges. And immediately, supporters started claiming that the charges weren't really rape, that they were some kind of Sweden-specific set of actions that no other country in the world considers rape, and that Sweden allows women to determine well after they'd previously given consent that they were raped.

I bought that last line, briefly. I'm not proud of my gullibility. I am proud that my main concern at that point was for the two women involved; I feared that international pressure from embarrassed governments would be used to "persuade" any Swedish women Assange may have had sex with to press charges they never wanted to press. (And, if you think about how any ex post facto law could work, I think that fear for the women was justified.)

However, we now know that Sweden does not play Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass games with legal causality, and that the charges were real rape charges that would indeed be considered rape in any civilized country. Moreover, Assange isn't denying the more cogent facts. A trial, at the very least, is justified.

And here's where things really start to go to hell: we have prosecutors who normally couldn't be arsed to press violent crime charges suddenly very interested in doing so, WikiLeaks's supporters talking totally out of their asses about Assange, rape, and the specific charges, and a few people calling for Assange to be tried for treason espionage (the "treason" calls finally petered out when it became more widely known that Assange is not an American).

So here's my take:

1. Assange is not WikiLeaks. The organization will very likely go on without him and his Draco Malfoy hair.


2. Assange should be put on trial for rape. There appears to be sufficient evidence for a trial.


3. The U.S. State Department is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only "victim" of WikiLeaks; Iran, Iraq, several European countries, and Assange's native Australia have all had "confidential" information disseminated by WikiLeaks.


4. That latter state of affairs should continue.


5. Therefore, the State Department should get its act together and reassess a whole lot of "classified" information, downgrading much of it to "not secret", possibly downgrading some "Top Secret" to "Secret", and then do a better job of enforcing that classification. This may well lead to many people losing their security clearances, as they will no longer need to know "classified" information.


6. Moreover, our diplomatic corps should act above reproach more often, but I realize that this is a pipe dream.