There are a lot of silly things being said about WikiLeaks in the media, primarily parroting the official US government line. Some quick rebuttals:

1. WikiLeaks is revealing dangerous secrets. Like Daniel Ellsberg said 35 years ago, it’s not a secret in Cambodia that we were bombing them, it was only a secret in America. WikiLeaks does not have a vast espionage network; it provides a central dropbox for whistleblowers. Vast espionage networks, presumably, have access to any data which is circulated widely enough to reach the whistleblowers; it’s not like Hillary Clinton is the source for these documents.
2. WikiLeaks is endangering Americans. Best refuted by the same Daniel Ellsberg on Democracy Now!. If there’s a specific danger, it hasn’t risen to the point where the military has warned any servicepeople about it. If there’s a generalized danger, it’s entirely unclear what this is. Mike Mullen is claiming all sorts of generalized danger from data-mining the archive—which is a) exceedingly vague, b) omits the point that large stacks of hay make it harder, not easier, to find needles, and c) ignores the fact that WikiLeaks is not dumping everything it has in one fell swoop to the public—which it certainly could do.
3. Our government should control what remains secret. In general, yes—no one, including Julian Assange, disagrees with the right to privacy for personal issues. Governmental secrecy, however, is another matter, and there is no separation of powers between those deciding what is secret, and those who are protected from legitimate public reaction by it. There is also a strong public interest in knowing that our Two Wars model in Iraq and Afghanistan is a misnomer; the proper number is four, including Pakistan and—thanks to WikiLeaks—Yemen. I think there’s a clear public good in knowing which countries we’re committing acts of war against; this is the principle behind the First Amendment.

This is not to say that WikiLeaks is a perfect organization—far from it—or that I am 100% in agreement with Julian Assange. I’m particularly concerned about the rape charges leveled against him in Sweden, and I’m hoping to hear that they were trumped up for political reasons. I know nothing about the case beyond what I read in the mass media; I merely note that a sex crime charge is the perfect way to discredit him among the kind of people who would otherwise support his efforts. If he is found guilty, I’d prefer to not see the message tarred by ad hominem attacks on the messenger; far easier for the cause if he is not a sex criminal.

Whether he’s a criminal on the basis of his WikiLeaks work, though, remains up for debate. But we should note the double standard: Western nations are strongly in favor of transparency of government for all other nations as a guiding principle. The leaked documents show that our own government, and many of our allies, are not living up to this ideal. I would be quicker to defend the right of the government to stamp Top Secret on a document if there weren’t such a long string of examples showing that they do this to facilitate actions ranging from avoiding embarrassment to breaking their own laws when it’s convenient.

A few resources:

Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists has been tracking governmental secrecy issues for decades—and no, we do not agree on all points. Start with his blog, then jump into the archive.

When details come out to the public about how these documents were made available to the whistleblowers, and how they were moved to WikiLeaks, the first guy to read will be Bruce Schneier.

Finally—it should be a citizenship requirement that every American must watch the 2009 documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America, about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I thought I knew this story—I was wrong. It was far worse than I learned in grad school.