The Assange Leaks

The Assange Leaks: What’s New About the WikiLeaks Data? – Joshua Foust, Columbia Journalism Review.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization’s latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to “opening the Stasi archives” in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers.

Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political “crimes” against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy’s involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon’s decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is… daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don’t…

Assange’s justification for putting hundreds of lives at stake—”All of this material is more than seven months old, so it has no operational significance… there is no danger”—is as false as it is naí¯ve. Many of the operations he details through these leaks are still ongoing, and many of the people involved in them are still there, hoping these leaks don’t make them into targets for assassination. Indeed, Adam Serwer, a staff writer for The American Prospect, tweeted this morning, “Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, ‘Its an AQ/Taliban execution team’s treasure trove.'” …

Much more at Columbia Journalism Review.