The release of some 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks did not come as a welcome surprise to the Obama administration. Governments generally don’t like their secrets revealed. And these dispatches, with their candid accounts of closed-door meetings with foreign officials, could hinder diplomacy, embarrass other governments and conceivably put individuals in danger.
But what to do about it? The Justice Department has raised the possibility of prosecuting Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. While the leaked information undoubtedly creates headaches, the administration should be careful not to overreact.
In the first place, the latest damage has been greatly hyped. Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted that the consequences for American foreign policy will be “fairly modest.”
Most of the material that has come to light is merely embarrassing to one government or another. And some of it is valuable to the citizenry, such as the revelation that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered American diplomats to engage in spying, an abuse of their traditional role.
Focusing on Assange is a bit like worrying about being struck by thunder. It’s lightning that does the damage, and it’s the leaker, not the publisher, who is most dangerous. In the Internet age, as long as people in the government have access to secrets and want to expose them, there will be ways to do so.
The best way to protect secrets is to punish the people who violate their legal duty to safeguard them. Federal employees and military personnel can be dismissed as well as prosecuted. But the culture of Washington treats leaks as just another tool of political gamesmanship.
In most cases, that’s OK. Leaks are generally helpful to public understanding of government policy or, at worst, harmless. But when federal officials disclose secrets that truly jeopardize national security, they should be held fully accountable.
Going after Assange is harder. It can be a crime to receive secret security-related material, but the government would have to prove that Assange meant to cause harm to the United States, not merely improve public understanding. An indictment in this instance would be particularly questionable since the Justice Department did nothing earlier, when WikiLeaks published material that reportedly exposed U.S. informants in Afghanistan — with potentially fatal consequences.
“The government has never brought an Espionage Act prosecution that would look remotely like this one,” American University law professor Stephen Vladeck told The New York Times — which makes success uncertain at best.
In any event, the government should be exceedingly cautious about punishing people for declining to keep secrets that the government itself has allowed to escape. Its more crucial task is to clean its own house.
