WikiLeaks' real story: Net has a lot of holes

A riches of embarrassment. That's what Sunday's WikiLeaks "document dump" - 251,287 documents, to be exact, some going back to 1966 - really is.

No bombshells. In the United States, China, Yemen, and Germany, pols and ambassadors are red-faced. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, is looking pretty sneaky. The WikiLeaks leaks have embarrassed people and fueled many a talk show and political mouth.

But the real story is that of information: In today's media world, info is immortal, and hackers have the edge, creating a designer headache for those - governments, for example - who want to keep info secret.

How damaging? A quarter of a million documents, classified secret and below, were given by someone to the folks at WikiLeaks, known as a "whistleblowers website." WikiLeaks gave them to editors at papers such as Der Spiegel, the Guardian, El País, Le Monde, and the New York Times. WikiLeaks involves a number of servers scattered in at least five countries (none in the United States); its director is Julian Assange, an Australian now on Interpol's most-wanted list for sex charges in Sweden. So WikiLeaks' activities lie nicely beyond the reach of U.S. law.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has called the leaks "a nightmare for the State Department and a nightmare for the American people." True, the leaks may make U.S. diplomacy a little trickier. Some will set Arab neighbors a little more at odds (although probably not much). Some may have North Korea sweating about its gigantic neighbor, China.

But much was known already, and the rest wasn't too surprising. (Flash! Diplomats talk trash!) William Beeman, chair of anthropology at the University of Minnesota and an expert on how diplomats communicate, calls the leaks "the daily bread-and-butter communications between people who work in the diplomatic corps."

Diplomats, Beeman says, complain and posture to one another all the time. "Think about your own workplace," he says. "You speak one way to your boss, another to your coworkers. There has to be a place in the workplace for candor. In diplomacy, such candor is essential, because it lets others know what's going on."

By the way, that thing Saudi King Abdullah said about Iran? "Cut off the head of the snake"? Not such a big deal, says Beeman: "If you read through the dispatches, he says that about a lot of countries. It's what he says."

Of course, it wasn't meant to get out. Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers, says these leaks are "actually less dangerous" than the late-July leaks about the Afghanistan war, "which contained tactical information that really could have jeopardized lives."

The great struggle. The real story is the battle over information. Ever since the Web was born, a grim battle has been waged 24/7 between keepers of sensitive data and those who want to make it public. As more and more of the human world moves online, that struggle, dramatic and unseen, grows ever more gigantic.

Government will always lag in the secrecy wars. The U.S. government is its own universe of data stored all sorts of ways, many of them obsolete. Norman Solomon, media critic and executive director for the Institute for Public Accuracy, says, "The administration, and any administration of such size, has its hands full. They cannot hope to keep such large amounts of secret information away from view forever. It's a digital, on-steroids version of Whac-a-Mole." Government experts can't move as fast as private-sector genius-kid hackers. As Solomon puts it, "You're playing catch-up all the time."

You're also underfunded. According to Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, and a former member of the State Department's policy- planning staff, "We were overwhelmed by the information revolution. State Department funding for technology, or lack of funding, always keeps it behind the private sector."

A little too easy.

An Article 32 hearing (similar to a grand jury hearing, but under the U.S. military code) is scheduled soon regarding charges of unauthorized communication of classified information against Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private and former intelligence analyst who worked at an operations base in Iraq.

According to e-mails (themselves leaked) reportedly from Manning, he may have downloaded the documents by inserting a CD, labeled "Lady Gaga," into his workplace computer. Earphones on, pretending to sing along with "Telephone," he allegedly was compressing and copying hundreds of thousands of documents, which he then relayed to WikiLeaks.

Lady Gaga? A CD? A little too easy.

"The problem that jumps out," Baker writes by e-mail, "is that an Army Pfc. got access to traffic at the ministerial level." Hurlburt notes that Manning apparently took advantage of a government effort "to make privileged information more available on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"When Daniel Ellsberg took the Pentagon Papers in 1971, it involved photocopying thousands of pages, a huge job," Solomon says. "Today, you can do it in a keystroke."

What to do? There's no fix.

One thing that wouldn't work is simply to block, shut down, or seize websites.

"You could try that," says Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In fact, the government seized a bunch of websites over the weekend. But the way it works, lots of people already had the information," including the newspapers, "so the headlines wouldn't be any different."

WikiLeaks made sure to diffuse the information far and wide instantly, so it was already too late. "That's one of the things the Internet does really well," Jeschke says.

Baker and Hurlburt want severe, conspicuous punishment of the info-thieves. Some officials, such as U.S. Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), want WikiLeaks to be declared a terrorist organization, and Assange prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

Baker writes that international law should be trained on WikiLeaks: "Julian Assange should be subject to the laws of piracy. He is an international outlaw." Hurlburt wants to come down hard on convicted hackers: "You must find and make an example of them and make clear this won't happen again."

Then she makes a suggestion she knows won't suit a recession-era Washington battling over every greenback: "What if Congress were actually willing to give [the Department of] State enough to maintain a state-of-the-art system? If we committed to the best resources available?"

After all, other people out there have just that. And they know how to use it.