Something to say about WikiLeaks

Oh hell, why not? Everybody and his dog has, so far.

The difference, in my generation, may be that I actually held a Top Secret clearance. For excellent--though now declassified--reasons. My day job, so to speak, in the Navy was in communications, at a time when the Cold War was really, really cold. It seemed plausible then that a screw-up could end with the incineration of the planet. So, even as far down the food chain as we were, people in my division took the security part of our job very seriously.

I never worked so hard to keep my native curiosity in check. For instance, at irregular intervals during every watch, we would receive cryptic--though not encrypted--secret messages. I knew enough to know that they referred to the several classes of Soviet submarines active in the Atlantic and to nautical plots with a certain consistency. It certainly seemed as if we knew when any given Soviet submarine exited into the open Atlantic, give or take a few minutes of time and a minute or so of latitude and longitude. I also knew that excess curiosity on the topic might ensure that my next tour of duty would be in Leavenworth.

Now we know how that worked. So deeply ingrained are the habits I acquired then that I won't dwell on that knowledge here. Assange and his compeers strike me as the sort of arrogant assholes who simply grab at information without any thought for consequences. indeed, the Swedish sex crimes charge seems of a piece with the whole thing. It is another play of the "laws are for little people" thing, another instance of the utter failure of the Western left, and the American left in particular, to maintain a sense of perspective. Successful revolutions use privileged information to overthrow governments. People who play at revolution use it to get onto TMZ.

What can we say though of the people who feed information to such parasites? More, what can we say about those who were supposed to be watching the people who handled the information? We had no flash drives in 1970. Indeed, we had no computers that could be transported in anything smaller than an 18-wheeler, but our supervisors knew enough to see that we had no parallel opportunity to remove information from a classified space. Now, it seems that an sufficiently motivated Pfc or GS-2 can walk into work with a 16 Gb flash drive and download the works. I could not have done such a thing at any of several employers or clients I've worked for, even if I had wanted to.

There was also a fairly well-understood priority for classifying information, and that seems to have eroded over the years. Secret messages--of the sort processed by peons like me--were serious business. Top Secret messages, of a sort I handled but never decrypted, were deadly serious. It does seem now as if any piece of diplomatic cattiness gets rocketed to the top echelons of secrecy, to the detriment of the entire concept. If the peons don't understand there's a value in silence, whose fault is it? Theirs, or their superiors, who can't tell an indiscretion from a real security risk?

It has been hilarious this week watching the actual diplomats make fools of eager-beaver broadcast journalists as all this has unfolded. One quoted a senior diplomat of an affected country as saying "never mind: you should see what we say about you." Only people like Assange, with that singular combination of arrogance and naivete, would think that their more newsworthy disclosures are news at all. Only the current crop of broadcast journalists would be their enablers. The trouble is that these two lots, between them, may also disclose items like the one I mentioned, of no consequence to them but of considerable military value, and never know it. And that sort of information can and should remain secure. You should not do magic you do not understand.