

Daniel Ellsberg on WikiLeaks (Economist Interview) - dfield
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/07/daniel_ellsberg_interview

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tptacek
I've got karma to burn, so I'll just point out that Daniel Ellsburg is not, in
fact, an authority on the impact or ethics of this Wikileaks dump.
Counterintuitive as it may sound, Daniel Ellsburg is not actually qualified to
judge whether Wikileaks did the same thing for AfPak that Ellsburg himself did
for Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers showed the war in Southeast Asia to have been an outright
lie, and one to which the administration had resigned itself to losing but was
feeding troops into in an attempt to extricate itself "gracefully". It exposed
overtly illegal activities on a _strategic_ scale, such as the widespread
bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which the government had previously disavowed.
The Pentagon Papers impacted the standing of the administration on a policy
level.

Anybody on Hacker News can compose an argument that suggests that somewhere in
the Wikileaks dump is information that would expose:

* strategic decisions to expand the AfPak conflict (say, continuous coordinated airstrikes into Baluchistan)

* strategic acceptance of defeat in AfPak and a decision to make a face-saving retreat at the expense of American lives

* the notion that we occupied Afghanistan for reasons other than the elimination of the Taliban (for instance, to grab resources, or to counter a resurgent Iran)

But so far, _no such information has been turned up_. Instead, we have the
meme that "the Wikileaks dump is like the Pentagon Papers in their raw
original form". But we don't know that. For that to be true, they would need
to paint a clear picture of a shocking distinction between reality and the
ongoing narrative of the conflict; we'd have to be secretly at war with
Pakistan or Iran, or already resigned to letting the Taliban reclaim the
country, or something at that scale.

Furthermore, the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks dump aren't ethically
equivalent. Ellsburg leaked 4,100 pages of digested intelligence and policy
information. Wikileaks dumped 70,000 documents taken directly from field
reports. Wikileaks claims to have "minimized harm" (presumably by scrubbing
names from reports or withholding documents they believed would have exposed
people to harm). Ellsburg didn't have to take responsibility for avoiding that
kind of harm; the NVA probably could not have organized death squads to react
to his disclosure.

Has this happened already in Afghanistan? Nobody has provided evidence that it
has, but it seems pretty clear that it's a real risk. Death squads don't care
about due process. All they need is a town, a time, and a rough description.

All this, as usual, is not meant to say that the US Government is on the
"right side" of this issue. For one (obvious) thing, none of this information
should have been available, to anybody; negligence in DoD information
assurance makes them just as culpable for deaths of outed informants.

But I'm still left wondering: if you don't draw the line at a decent (tens of
% points) chance at outing (and thus killing) an informant in Afghanistan
while you're sitting behind a laptop in a safe western country, where do you
draw the line? Is there any line at all?

~~~
dfield
Thanks for your comment. Insightful commentary like this is why I read
HackerNews.

