Reply #6: Not a fan of these leaks.

[ProSense]

Diplomacy is important work and it requires confidentiality and relationship building. People who can respect lawyer-client confidentiality, which is airtight, should be able to understand the difference between whistleblowing as a means of exposing crime and corruption for the greater good and simply revealing confidential information.

Embarrassment is a low bar for compromising foreign policy.

Transparency is a good thing, but diplomatic negotiations requires some level of confidentiality. Diplomacy is not being conducted in an environment in which all parties value Democracy and transparency. If people believe they can't speak freely, that is not condusive to diplomacy. The world is not paradise, and there are people in it who don't trust each other and those who would do others harm.

The other thing is that the bulk of the material was not top secret or secret information. Based on the NYT note, less than 5 percent of it was classified.

Josh Marshall

This is sort of a side note on the larger Wikileaks question. But in reading various commentary on the Cables story I see again and again references to government secrecy, over classification and so on. But very few of the documents seem to have been highly classified or even very far up to secrecy totem pole. Indeed, if I'm understanding the origin of the leak -- or as much as we think we know about it -- the reason these cables were accessible is because they were not highly classified. And thus in the post-9/11 effort to make sure information could flow freely between different parts of the government -- connecting the dots and so forth -- they were placed on a system where a lot of people in government could access them. As I said, this doesn't necessarily speak to the big questions people are talking about. But this whole question seems more like one of confidentiality -- the fact that the nation's diplomats do not immediately release their internal communications -- than 'secrecy' per se.

Still, it's not that the information isn't interesting or revealing. For example, it offers some insight relevant to climate/energy policy.