[hugh3]

The article keeps using the word "whistleblower", which I think may be inaccurate. A whistleblower is someone who breaks secrecy in order to expose something that's wrong. But leaking 260,000 state department cables just seems like leaking for the sake of leaking.

The ethics of this are, at least, peculiar.

[rdtsc]

You can figure out the ethics by thinking about the question : "Does the leaked stuff pose a national security risk or does it pose a national security embarrassment over basic human rights violations, waste, carelessness and so on?".

> But leaking 260,000 state department cables just seems like leaking for the sake of leaking.

The original leak was probably just a leak for leak's sake. They already caught that guy. However if any of these cables point to any embarrasing stuff that is secret just to avoid the govt. from appologizing, and Wikileaks picks it up after it was already exposed, then this becomes a whilstleblower issue.

I know legally they've sent the dogs after him because "if it is classified it is classified and we are not the department to ask why it was classified", but everyone else should automatically side with the govt.'s point of view if the data points to some serious moral and ethical problems inside Pentagon.

[hugh3]

"Does the leaked stuff pose a national security risk or does it pose a national security embarrassment over basic human rights violations, waste, carelessness and so on?"

I have no idea, I haven't seen the leaked stuff. But where diplomacy is concerned the line between "embarrassment" and "risk" is pretty thin, especially where the embarrassment is to another country. There could easily be things like candid discussions of personal weaknesses of foreign dignitaries, diplomatic tricks played to fool other countries into doing things, invoices for the hookers they hired to entertain the Saudi ambassador... if these sorts of things become public they could turn allies into enemies, and that's not good for anyone.

[rdtsc]

Sorry to reply to my own post. The edit window seemed to have expired, the last paragraph should say "...but everyone else should NOT automatically side..." .

[binarymax]

I am more inclined to question the ethics of the Pentagon than those of Wikileaks.

[hugh3]

I'm inclined to question everybody's ethics. Someone has to.

[greyman]

This was also my idea..I would like to see more documents from totalitarian regimes like Iran, China, North Korea, etc. Maybe Russia.

On the other side, that guy is not American, and he is not responsible for U.S. national security. Is he obliged to cooperate with Pentagon? And if he refuses, can they do him (legally) something bad?