Secrets and Lies: What Prevents the Next WikiLeaks?

With the verdict last week by a London judge to honor Sweden's request for his extradition, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could soon be charged and tried in Swedish courts. Assange, wanted for questioning regarding "unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape," has said he plans to appeal the judge's decision but failing that effort, he will be transferred to Stockholm in March. If he is charged and convicted, his jail sentence could be as long four years. Even if fortune should turn in Assange's favor (not entirely unlikely as he has a book contract, discussions are under way for a movie about him, and he has recently been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize) there still is a very real chance his wiki-whistleblower days are over.

But leaks of classified U.S. intelligence will surely continue.

I personally believe Julian Assange is a disclosure vandal, and have said before that consequence-free anonymous disclosure makes me uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I agree with my colleague Delia Lloyd that WikiLeaks has "forever altered modern journalism."

We daily see the parenthetical attribution "according to diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks" in our international news analysis. Indeed, as reporters have examined and reported on the website's purloined State Department correspondence, they have provided readers and watchers of news with a rich, nuanced understanding of the serious unrest unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as well as a sharper picture of regions from Brasilia to Dagestan

The lapse of security that allowed a cache of hundreds of thousands of classified documents to seep into the public domain through a hole in the secrecy net has prompted the U.S. government to roll back years of efforts to internally share information on terrorists and other threats. While Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton "strongly condemns" the illegal disclosure of classified information, there will be no way to stop continued access and study of the posted documents by scholars, journalists and even the very subjects of the diplomatic reports.

The stolen documents are widely believed to have been obtained when Pfc. Bradley Manning, an intelligence officer in his early 20s allegedly downloaded, from his military base in Iraq, a vast number of private, sensitive communications on to a disk disguised as a Lady Gaga CD. Many of those documents have been so widely disseminated by Assange that the only people curious about their contents that may not have already peeked are government employees concerned about jeopardizing their own security clearances.

We remember from the Pentagon Papers case that there were security breaches in the days before countless government terminals offered ready access to whomever held the right encryption key or password code, but there has never been a security rupture of the magnitude or range of the WikiLeaks violations. The sheer quantity of documents in our cyber repositories, the number of inexperienced or unsophisticated personnel at the keyboard and ubiquitous methods and opportunities to download, upload or unload make future unauthorized disclosures inevitable.

WikiLeaks comes out of the same controversial yet highly efficient Internet distribution engine for global sharing of data that resulted in Napster. It seems there is no way to completely put a lid on classified and secret documents, particularly in a networking environment populated by 20-year-old recruits.

So what's the answer? Less secrecy. Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy recommends "stripping away the accretions of decades of over classification, a wholesale reduction in classified records would restore some integrity to the classification system ... and strengthen the security of residual classified secrets." Also calling for more transparency, Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University testified to the House Judiciary Committee in December that "the government's national security classification system is broken [and] overwhelmed with too much secrecy."

Ironically, like Assange, these experts suggest releasing more documents as the solution. Only they suggest imposing a more orderly declassifying process first.