Swept up and away

If cyberspace had air, it would be thick with recriminations. Thanks to a series of slips compounded by warring whistle-blowing egos, an entire trove of 251,000 purloined American diplomatic cables has been published online. The result may be fatal for WikiLeaks, as well as embarrassingly revealing governments’ misdeeds, mishaps, evasions and cover-ups. One cable has allegations that American troops executed an Iraqi family, including five small children, in 2006. (The government in Baghdad has reopened an investigation.) Another questions the long-term safety of China’s nuclear-power plans. In a third, a Bulgarian minister admits to misleading environmentalists about legislation on genetically modified crops.
Previously released cables also featured unvarnished opinions. But the new lot include the names of people who talked to American officials. In countries like China that could bring nasty consequences. Even the most ardent advocates of open government would not defend the publication (also in the cables) of the private phone numbers of foreign leaders, such as the Queen of the Netherlands (a note adds that she speaks English well). WikiLeaks had earlier worked with media allies who edited out such sensitive details, though relations have now soured.
The cause of the fiasco is that WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, let multiple copies of a master file containing all the cables proliferate online, all encrypted with the same password (actually a phrase) that he had given David Leigh, a Guardian journalist. Mr Leigh later published the passphrase in a book (he says he thought it was no longer valid). People—perhaps including estranged former supporters of Mr Assange’s—started dropping hints until the secret was out. WikiLeaks has now joined other sites in publishing the cables in full.
Mr Assange’s file management looks sloppy, but Mr Leigh’s blunder seems bigger: since digital data is easily copied, safeguarding passwords is more important than secreting files. James Ball, an ex-ally now also at the Guardian, says Mr Assange intended to publish the bulk of the cables, unexpurgated, anyway, once he had released the juiciest ones to the media.
 Either way, the damage is done. Diplomats may now be cagier about what they put in cables, but their work has not ground to a halt. The leaks show “we have not been lied to,” says a foreign diplomat. The lines American officials maintained to their allies turn out to be largely what they also told their bosses, she says. Carne Ross, a former British envoy who now runs Independent Diplomat, a consultancy, says that the risk of leaks may encourage more official integrity. A senior European politician dismisses that as “bullshit”.
The only consolation to harried diplomats and their fearful interlocutors is that another leak on this scale seems unlikely. America has tightened the rules that once gave some 2.5m people—including the alleged leaker, Bradley Manning, an army private—access to everything classified “secret” and below. Most other rich-world governments were already more careful than America was; they are even more so now.
But digital records are inherently vulnerable. WikiLeaks is just one prominent example of the assault on government security. An operation dubbed GhostNet, apparently originating in China, pilfered information from over 100 countries. Any of it could end up leaked.
WikiLeaks itself seems in trouble. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, once a leading member, has left to set up his own outfit, OpenLeaks. His absence temporarily crippled the ability of WikiLeaks to accept new submissions. It has had trouble fund-raising (you can buy Ku Klux Klan garb with major credit cards, but for months issuers barred donations to WikiLeaks). Mr Assange, dogged by leaks about misrule and mayhem, is fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden on sex-assault charges; a judgment is due next month. Though WikiLeaks made a big splash, wider changes in online publishing now matter more.
His legacy, however, will remain. WikiLeaks was not the first site to create an electronic dead-letter drop, but it was the first to try to combine it with a legal structure as impervious as its technical one, by basing its servers in countries with strong privacy laws. Copycat sites have sprung up, though SafeHouse, a submissions page at the Wall Street Journal, drew derision for its plentiful caveats and get-out clauses.
Still, that approach may be more honest. Replicating WikiLeaks, it seems, is hard. OpenLeaks is trying, and unlike WikiLeaks it plans to let leakers decide who gets their material; but nearly a year after Mr Domscheit-Berg started, it still isn’t accepting submissions. And he too is making enemies. A German hackers’ outfit, the Chaos Computer Club, has expelled him, ostensibly for asking its members to test his system. In fact, say German media reports, the hackers felt he had mishandled relations with Mr Assange.
John Young of Cryptome, the oldest and best established whistle-blowers’ site, says that the fundamental mistake made by WikiLeaks was to promise an impossible level of security. (Cryptome explicitly says it “never claims trustworthiness, authenticity or security…Expect to be deceived.”) Everyone will learn from Mr Assange’s failures. People will have more ways to leak secrets, and will think harder about whom to entrust them to—especially media outfits that claim to be tech-savvy and trustworthy. Governments and companies will be warier about what they put online. That is an indelible record.
@'The Economist'