"WikiLeaks remains a powerful but undemocratic and unaccountable entity which shows a general disregard for both the rule of law and the practical need for certain communications and data to be confidential."

So, no different to any newspaper, multinational or shady government department then.

If you'd like to understand why wikileaks does what it does - and it's surprisingly radical - one could do worse than read this essay:
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-comput...

I think it will help @carla & @Nick Gordon in particular with their concerns, about small fry and what the purpose of a leak by wikileaks is.

Although I'm surprised at how many commenters say that so far they can't see the moral wrongdoing in the content of the cables: lies, deceit, an arab king calling for someone else to drop bombs on his enemy, a president running the mafia, the Brits hiding US cluster bombs, palette-loads of dollars vanishing into warzones...

Looks like an awful lot of wrongdoing to these jaded eyes.

I vote for Wiki Leaks.

Unlike politicians and governments it does not serve up BS or spin.

As one of the masses I enjoy seeing the high and mighty shaking in their boots.

Besides it is better than comedy.

Has anyone yet come across a single case of something in these leaks which is actually damaging to world welfare or really risks harm to anyone/ It's pathetic to watch people jumping as lapdogs to those in power who are just embarrassed by people knowing the truth.
None of these leaks seem really important but that's not a reason to condemn them.

The privacy issue is interesting. It seems there are two kinds of privacy in diplomacy, privacy from your corresponding nations, and privacy from the public. It seems very likely that much of this was known to diplomats, probably quite widely. If WikiLeaks obtained this information, probably many nations could too.

The real change has been that the inner workings of diplomacy have become visible to a worldwide public, which can cause serious embarrassment to nations which have relied on their public being unaware of their true intentions. The impact could be very high in less liberal states, where their governments inner workings appear to differ from their public statements.

There is an awkward moral question here: is it right to reveal these differences or not? On the one hand, keeping that information private permits realpolitik in states that might otherwise be ideological. On the other, the more ideological states are implicitly being maintained by endorsing their right to remain publicly ideological. Is it worth it? I'm not yet sure.

What is truly staggering is the development of senior US political and media figures invoking charges of treason and calls for death penalties for those involved. This implies that parts of the US regard public ignorance as something worth killing to maintain. That is alarming. And very non-liberal.

Good to see Alex Jones has already turned up to provide his two penneth.

RJD has it right. The truth is amoral - neither good nor bad on a moral level, but if any kind of meaningful progress is to be made then facts have to be made clear. The condemnation of those who speak unfashionable truths is nothing new - it took the Catholic church until 1992 to even admit that the Earth is not the centre of our solar system - but the need for those unfashionable truths is as old as civilisation. Every member of society needs to know that the people at the helms of ships of state are good at what they're doing - and if they're not, that needs to be made clear.

One of the things found in this Wikileaks release is that the Obama administration and congressional Republicans have been working since at least April of last year to intimidate the Spanish government into silencing a judge who planned to have several Bush administration officials up on trial for war crimes. The only thing both sides of the US' political aisle have done in complete agreement, and it's to make sure the organisers and perpetrators of human rights violations get off the hook. Stuff of this importance has to be known, and its frankly frightening implications leave the legality of the releases as a secondary issue for me - and I can't be the only one.

What crap. The US government has no legitimacy or moral authority. It is a war machine organized by US corporations and a few foreign interests like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Its only mandate is to make its masters richer and more powerful. This means it will torture, kill, and destroy everyone and everything in its path.

We need more Wikileaks. 1000s of them. So day the people of the world will rise of and choke the beast to death. But they won't rise up until they are fed up. Wikileaks is feeding the revolution. Bravo! Bravo!

Accountability is an important issue, but the very purpose of Wikileaks is to hold the powerful to account. Wikileaks has no power whatsoever without the people who leak it the information, it is merely a conduit through which people can leak information to securely.

Another powerful and undemocratic group used to be solely responsible for leaking confidential information in the name of serving the public interest, namely the media. The problem is, the interests of the media and the public often diverge quite dramatically. Wikileaks closes this gap considerably by making the documents available to everyone.

‎"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act"
George Orwell

If you don't like Wikileaks you really should just say so, David, rather than going through all these unbecoming rhetorical contortions.

The media is not democratic and yet claims for itself, under liberal doctrine, that it is the watchdog on the state. Will you be extending your critique to journalists at large? I do hope so, I would like to see that unlikely pairing of you and Noam Chomsky joined in argument against obvious failings of the undemocratic media.

The legal system is not democratic. Would you like to see judges elected? Barristers elected? Solicitors elected? (But no, you will no doubt say, we are the 'experts' on law).

What about corporations? Clearly they are exceedingly undemocratic! I look forward to your forthcoming socialist manifesto on more democracy in the workplace.

Perhaps only certain people, those you don't like, have to be democratically made accountable?

What about legality? Which 'law' has Wikileaks broken exactly? US law? Swedish law? UK law? Where exactly are they based for you to have such confidence that they have broken a specific territorial law? Or perhaps you want to silence the UK media for publishing that which has been released elsewhere? Even if it is in the public interest? A curious position for a liberal.

Thirdly, we come to privacy. Do you mean the private sphere? Of the home? What are the limits of 'privacy'? What about domestic abuse? Should that be 'leaked' to the police by neighbours?

Or do you mean private conversations? But what if a criminal activity is taking place in this 'private' sphere? Perhaps politicians are plotting an illegal activity, taking bribes? Of course they will call for privacy! To the courtroom they will declare to stop the publishing of their 'private' conversations and activities. And they may well have the law behind them, as in the case of MP expenses not so long ago, but the law in that case was an ass, and even though the Telegraph had no legal right to publish, there was a clear public interest in the case, and the moral force behind it was enough to make the 'law' rather quiet.

Underlying this is your unvoiced theory of power, I think it would be very helpful if you would spell it out clearly so we know what you class as an 'abuse of power' and what is 'legitimate power'.

Don't get me wrong. What we need are more WikiLeaks about the internal workings of the banks. Just imagine what it would be like if we had every conversation in the last 10 years every agreement or quid-pro-quo every grubby decision they made? It would be massive. People would be so outraged.

"Whatever is shaky ought to be pushed over."

The accountability of Wikileaks is not so much of a concern if we see them as a wrecking ball. A force knocking at those elements of the status quo that are constructed in such a way that they are vulnerable to "truth".

It has been widely remarked that the information leaked in the cables has not been "news" to people who are involved with international politics. It's also unlikely that there is anything in these really-not-so-restricted communications that other governments did not already know. The primary (and positive) effect of the leaks has been to show people what their governments are up to.

I hate injustice, not Americans.

It's absurd to conflate the interests of the American ruling class, which, is, after all, only a few percent of the population, with the rest of the population.

There's a vast chasm seperating them from each other, socially and economically. They might as well be living on different planets. Their 'interests' are, quite different, non-compatible, and arguably in total opposition.

So, being anti-American ruling class means that one is supporter of the vast majority of the American people against their lords and masters.

I'm not sure why you question the "undemocratic" nature of Wikileaks. Are they less democratic than news organisations like Fox News, the Guardian or the New York times?

In Julian Assange's essay "State and terrorist conspiracies" he quotes Roosevelt thus: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesman-ship."

I liberal sentiment I am sure you will agree.

I note that you are careful not to argue that legality and/or privacy is more important than transparency. It is of course a moral question even when it is also a legal one.

Thus far no-one has shown any harm due to the release of this information. Is it possible that despite the the vilification from the US and other governments that the leaks have thus far been responsibly handled?

Is this not demonising Wikileaks' success? Would any of us have to receive democratic legitimacy if we came across very important information that may cause a stir/be potentially dangerous on a national scale?

As far as I see, the latest Wikileaks seem to have been positive, on balance.

Diplomacy depends a lot on secrecy and hypocrisy to function as efficient as possible.

But when systems are optimised for efficiency, the result is often sub-optimal, and not robust against surprising things happening.

One solution to overly sub-optimised systems is an occasional shake-up, to force the system out of its sub-optimal state.

Wikileaks is now doing this for the world diplomatic system. Governments have to reset to the real reality, can no more deny certain facts. I think this will leave us with a diplomatic world that is more robust against surprises, revelations of dark secrets.

This article reminds me why I despise lawyers in general. (There are one or two good ones - e.g. Phillippe Sands).

Everything this lawyer has written is premised on the tacit assumption that governments are private agents entitled to secrecy in their dealings. The only area in which the government is authorised to operate under cover is in the area of defence against a known and declared enemy - declared by them and not us. That makes the defence legitimate and not the type that George Bush and Tony Blair invented, pre-emptive "defence". As such, it's plain to see that everything that has been leaked is information that should be ours. The problem is not with what Wikileaks is doing (as is being slyly hinted at by the ever so lawyerly lawyer)- the problem is solely with the paradigm with which those who worship concentrated are operating.

Pretty much everything that has gone wrong in international relations can be traced to these leaks and the belief that governments can act as private agents in their dealings with the rest of the world. It's a paradigm that is widely accepted and yet is completely rejected in any government's domestic dealings. The continued acceptance of this hypocrisy means that governments like the US and the UK continue to believe that it is perfectly normal to plot wars and strategies for demonising states they deem fit for control in the "national interest."

Under the Blair and Brown years we had a public government that wanted to watch its private citizens' every move and see all our communications on the grounds that if we had nothing to hide we should have nothing to fear. And yet when this principle is applied in the direction that it can validly be applied - namely private citizens watching their public servants - we are told by the power worshipping lawyer that this might be illegal!

In a world in which perverse laws are increasingly removing the ability citizens to watch their public servants, we have no use for lawyers like Green. When I read crap like this, the words of MLK ring loud and clear - we have a duty to disobey unjust laws. Any law that prohibits what Wikileaks does is a law for China, Russia and Zimbabwe. Julian Assange is the only lawyer I want to hear from. He is a true hero and whatever I can do to further his project, I will galdly do.

And just so that we are all clear about this - fuck David Green's "rule of law". All power to Wikileaks.

Lets not forget that the Swedish (hardly a US proxy) supreme court has today confirmed Assange's arrest warrant for rape, and he has accordingly been flagged by Interpol.

Also, no-one seems to ask - what is the point, really, of disclosing these cables? Do we really want to put Julian Assange personally in charge of dicatating what is public, and what is private? What sort of society is that?

Oh RJD you are beastly aren't you? Your comments have upset David! Look at his Twitter feed. It's a twitter feed of tears.

@lloyd jenkins

Oh and finally - I did a word count on the first 2 comments I made - 840. You made no real comment on those. The 3rd and final comment that you chose to take issue with, and failed miserably in the process as a result of basic reading error (I say 'error' because I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt with regards to your integrity), contained 20 words. Good job, bob!

The fact that you homed in on the comment that contained no intellectual argument but did contain the word 'fuck', and then misread it to boot, is delightfully freudian.

David, I admire as always your ability to grapple with these issues (I have now spent about 3 hours trying to write a comment!) and I agree with the subtlety of your approach to the question.
The thing is, I was one of the many who gave money to wikileaks when they were threatened with closure or being stifled (?) or some such thing. Fine, I thought, there needs to be a place where whistleblowers can find an outlet to satisfy their conscience, and disseminate information for the public interest. However, I am getting increasingly anxious about the organisation - this latest leak seems to me to be entirely malicious, full stop.

Usually whistle blowing - which is protected and encouraged by our democratic legal systems in many ways, not least by allowing for some defences against claims for violation of confidentiality in private commercial contexts and the long erosion of the principle of public interest immunity - is protected and encouraged because violating normal expectations, or legal injunctions, of confidentiality (both in the private and in the public sphere) will bring to light unlawful or immoral behaviour, or in the case of public policy, fraud of some sort on the electorate.

The current leak, however, does no such thing nor does it tell us its reasons (we know that the guy who leaked the Afghan stuff was morally moved, for example).

This is like eavesdropping at the door of one's older brother. I don't care what confidences ambassadors collect and transmit home. Theirs is a job by definition of deception and compromise (they are the 'acceptable' face of spy business, after all), but without a British ambassador in a dictatorship, when a Briton gets arrested on this or that charge, it would be much harder to get that Briton out. Diplomats are not meant to be accountable to the public at large, governments are. Diplomats are mere conduits, they certainly do not take initiatives! The use to which governments, on the other hand, put the information collected is what we should scrutinise, and, pace RJD, sometimes things are more complicated than laymen can appreciate.

I just can't see the use, necessity, or _good_ that this particular leak can possibly have had. As far as I can tell these are not indications of untoward policies, or morally repugnant - and hypocritical - actions. Heck, we even learn that Gordon Brown tried and failed to negotiate with the US for the hacker guy. It's not like he went on the news saying he'd tried, and actually backstage he pushed for the guy's execution! The sole effect (I do not think "aim" but surely a foreseeable effect) is to shame and undermine the USA in their international relations. But it does not tell the American public anything about the policies of their government (surely that's who should be accountable, and to whom) nor does it tell us anything about the policies of our own leaders etc. How is this in the public interest?

Wikileaks has, as far as I'm aware, broken no laws here (if there's any information relating to places such as Turkey or Singapore, let alone bona fide dictatorships, I wouldn't bet on there not being an offence of "insulting the State" in those jurisdictions). But then, NEITHER have the authors or participants or objects of the communications revealed (as far as I can tell). Even the much vaunted Prince Andrew conversation... there's no smoking gun there, the worst one can say is that he's no morally strong leader. Thank goodness he isn't a leader. He is a marketing executive for the UK giving an after-dinner party speech to his 'bosses' (UK industry people) and showing no respect for the rule of law, or playing to his audience's prejudices. A lot of people have such opinions, but the crucial thing is that the leaks do not tell us that he acted on this disrespect. So they tell us nothing of use to us as the public who pay his "salary". I'm sure we don't pay him to be a model citizen and an upstanding defender of the law (though I agree it would help).

What I fear, with respect to Wikileaks, is that this particular leak only happened "because they could", not because it would do any particular good, except raise their profile. That is not encouraging accountability, that is an exercise of power, and all power plays, when wielded by people in themselves unaccountable and secretive, strike me as rather dangerous.

I have to disagee with Green's blog here - if the only "truth" we get to know are those "truths" that government lets us know, we will never know the truth at all. So forget the privacy argument - and as far as the "democracy" argument, wh...ile for editorial matters it is important to have a process and a response to your audience, these are not "stories" being written, these are primary "sources" being released. They speak for themselves. I think this is the finest act of journalism since Woodward/Bernstein and/or the Pentagon papers. And I hate all of this ink spilled over whether Assange did "right" or "wrong" and "what's next?" Journalists should be busy tracing these documents into real stories on the geopolitical ramifications of these revelations - which are not insignificant - , not continuing with what is essentially gossip (the human interest story of Assange).

But Assange isn't a liberal, heaven forbid, they're full of crap, and bend over and beg at the first sign of resistance from the ruling class, just like with the Liberal Democrats.

Assange is closer to a radical democrat, or anarchist, and boy do we need more of those in times like these, with the state strangling what little liberty we've got left as we move towards the age of perpetual war, and all that implies.

When our politicians, also known as the political wing of the ruling class, are so murderous, corrupt, deceitful, lying, mendacious, violent, hypocritical and devious, it's not surprising that the gaping chasm between what these creeps say and what the do, is so colossal, that lots of people simply can't bring themselves to keep quite and ignore these huge disparities.

Truth and honesty are not always 'liberal' and polite, in fact they are confrontational and blaze a trail through the forest of obsfucation and propaganda that passes for liberal debate.

If independent journalism existed Wikileaks wouldn't be needed, only it doesn't really exist. The Iraq war showed that. One could go so far as to call the attack a 'mistake', but not so far as to call it a 'crime.' Because that would mean that our liberal politicians were a bunch of craven criminals covered in blood and gore, and that they were professional liars in a political system that's structurally corrupt and fundamentally ant-democratic, and that perspective would see the end of one's career in journalism, more or less.

Wikileaks is a reaction to the debasement and degeneration of mainstream, corporate, journalism.

Excellent commentary writeon.