Another WikiLeaks whirlwind has hit us. The trick, truly, is to stay grounded and ask a question that newspapers (yes, even The New York Times) don’t easily ask: This is all mighty interesting, and truly, madly juicy, but…should we really be colluding with nihilists who traffic in stolen information?
There are a few observations that one should make in the face of the latest act by Julian Assange, the prime mover of WikiLeaks, who has just dumped in the laps of four publications—The Times, The Guardian of London, El Pais of Madrid, and Germany’s Der Spiegel—thousands of purloined pages of diplomatic correspondence between United States Embassies across the world and the State Department in Washington. This correspondence was never intended to enter the public domain, and its entry into the public domain may have thrown American diplomacy into a crisis of confidence.
