Communications of the ACM
Declare War on Wikileaks
The Wikileaks organization has morphed from a relatively harmless aid to government whistleblowers into a threat to U.S. national security. It should be treated accordingly.
As with the July dump of Afghan war documents, the mainstream press has attempted to kindle story lines from the Iraq war data dump that imply scandal, particularly regarding civilian casualties. But once again, the information is underwhelming. There are no smoking guns except for some inconvenient truths about the actual existence of Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction program and Iranian involvement in Iraq's insurgency. For the most part, however, this type of information was well known to those who had been paying attention for the past seven years. Nevertheless, the new details about Iranian involvement in fanning the flames of insurgency in Iraq were alarming enough for the Islamic regime in Tehran to charge that Wikileaks is part of a U.S. government plot.
The 392,000 classified documents are an impressive quantity but lacking in quality. They are brief, tactical-level, on-the-scene reports that offer a soda-straw view of events. They are impressions from the field that may or may not have happened exactly as reported, with no means of verification. They aren't highly classified reports on detailed investigations into events, or records of lengthy two-way communications or other documents that would lend necessary context and corroboration. The Wikileaks database may be a starting point for analysis of events in the Iraq war, but it renders only a superficial look at any given topic.
Most disheartening about the continuing Wikileaks saga is the inability of our government to mount a counterstrike against the sites dispensing classified information or—worse still—the ineffectiveness of whatever countermeasures the government is employing...
From The Washington Times
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